Linus Torvalds: Talk of Tech Innovation is Bullshit. Shut Up and Get the Work Done (theregister.co.uk)

Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving. From a report on The Register: The term of art he used was more blunt: "The innovation the industry talks about so much is bullshit," he said. "Anybody can innovate. Don't do this big 'think different'... screw that. It's meaningless. Ninety-nine per cent of it is get the work done." In a deferential interview at the Open Source Leadership Summit in California on Wednesday, conducted by Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Torvalds discussed how he has managed the development of the Linux kernel and his attitude toward work. "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details." Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.

Comments

Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone honest.

Re:Finally

[BarbaraHudson]

Actually, the correct headline would be "Tech is bullshit." The scramble to over-hype and monetize and get rich quick has ruined it.

One good example is the internet. Overall, it has been a net loss for humanity. Ignoring the fact that social media is turning everyone into anti-social bubble-heads living in their little "safe zones", just look at the failure of Arab Spring, which was touted as an example of how the internet would liberate people. The total of dead and displaced is in the millions, and threatens to bring down the EU.

And that's just one example. Look, you'll find more. If I had a time machine and could go back in time to keep one person from being borm, it wouldn't be Hitler - it would be Tim Berniers-Lee. Ultimately, the death toll from a destablized Europe is going to be much higher. Neither Hitler nor Stalin had nukes, and the current buffoon in the white house has already destroyed any foreign policy cred he may have had. Russia and China know that the US is now just a paper tiger, and that sort of weakness will embolden them to the point where the only response will have to be a nuclear one.

Re:Finally

[Rakarra]

He may be honest, but he's also wrong. Yes, of course "real work" needs to be done to turn ideas into reality, but those ideas are at least as important as the work themselves. "Real work" in service of bad ideas is entirely wasted, and there are plenty of Silicon Valley companies turning out useless apps and software products that won't go anywhere that talented people have spent a lot of time making.

Linus is wrong, and "innovation," however you want to define it, is damned important.

Re:Finally

[Zero__Kelvin]

I have bad news for you but the Internet existed well before Tim Berniers-Lee got involved with it.

"One good example is the internet. Overall, it has been a net loss for humanity."

Ignoring the bad pun, claiming that enabling technologies are a "mass loss" is purely absurd.

Re:Finally

[Dutch Gun]

The internet is not to blame for humanity's failings. Neither can we realistically expect it to solve them. I'll still take, on balance, the world's information at our fingertips and global communication and commerce over whatever alternative you think would be better.

the failure of Arab Spring, which was touted as an example of how the internet would liberate people

Only by incredibly naive, overly-optimistic pundits. For those of us living in reality, it turned out pretty much as expected.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Torvalds' personality is more of an incrementalist than a visionary. He wants to master a field before he publishes his work, and it's easier (note: *not* easy) to master to something if there is a good-size accumulation of outstanding work from predecessors.

That's not a criticism because one could say the same of many first-rate engineers and scientists.

Re:Finally

[Cederic]

As one of the commentards on The Register highlighted, Git deviated and can easily be considered innovative.

So while much of his work has been taking 'good' and improving it to 'great' he's also capable of the sideways shift into a different future.

Re:Finally

[WheezyJoe]

Linus' point is there's too much attention spent on hype (the "innovation"), and too little spent on actually getting something built. Having built something himself, and maintained it longer than the lifespans of countless tech companies, he's in an excellent position to say what he's saying. The weak link in the chain is where you start raising money with your idea and your salesmanship, and it becomes time to start hiring engineers, leasing office and factory space, and building prototypes that have a shot at becoming real products. All that costs money, a lot of it, and some "entrepreneurs" and their benefactors simply can't handle seeing all that money they raised just slip away. Easier to keep it, brag about how much you've raised, keep shaking hands with billionaires, and keep on partying on the fund-raising circuit, kicking the whole build-it thing down the road for as long as you can (it's better than bankruptcy in the event your product fails). Human-nature can creep in and fuck-up any good idea with fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Seems to me lately only weird guys with personality disorders like Jobs, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg can both raise the money and push the right people just the right way to get a product out the door. Wasn't it Jobs who said "Real artists ship"? That's what Linus was talking about.

Re:Finally

[tlhIngan]

He may be honest, but he's also wrong. Yes, of course "real work" needs to be done to turn ideas into reality, but those ideas are at least as important as the work themselves. "Real work" in service of bad ideas is entirely wasted, and there are plenty of Silicon Valley companies turning out useless apps and software products that won't go anywhere that talented people have spent a lot of time making.

No, ideas are a dime a dozen. You probably come up with a dozen ideas every hour, from the mundane to fantasy.

Execution is key. An idea is just that, abstract. It doesn't mean anything, and millions of individuals will have that same idea. Most of the time, we don't work on the idea - either we realize it's fantasy and thus not worth looking into, or it's pointless, or the ROI is bad. But in the end, the idea doesn't matter. It's the execution of taking that idea and turning it into reality that's important.

And yes, some ideas are totally bad. But behind every useless app was an idea that seemed good, and heck, enough people believed in it to actually bring it to fruition. Now, it could be an incredibly bad idea to begin with, but someone had the resources and means to get it done. Or it could be a good idea executed too early before the market was ready for it (look at streaming music - back a decade and a half, "renting music" was considered a ludicrous idea, now it's a billion dollar industry). Or suffer from poor marketing.

And finally, what seems like a bad idea now might've seemed like a good one at the time.

You really don't know the value of an idea until you try it out.

Re:Finally

[epine]

Much to the point of this thread, the day is not long in coming where a series of small, hotly debated innovations in machine learning will culminate in a robust classifier able to ferret out a dozen egregious offenses against working brain cells in that toxic screed of hot-button click-bait you just posted.

The wise among us will use this forthcoming capability to accept all well-formed signals, the fools will filter bubble to black. The later group being larger than the former group, while the former group holds all the marbles, much derived from clue will change, while much derived from populism changes little, as our social algorithms contrive to sneer, in an arms race of eloquent dissection.

If Linus had ever worked on a truly hard problem, he might think different. Not every impasse in life can be resolved by industrious sleeve-rolling.

Operating systems don't hold opinions on human social dynamics. Earth-shattering innovation need not apply.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linus had ever worked on a truly hard problem, he might think different.

Yeah, kernel programming, software architecture, and project/personnel management on a project the size of the linux kernel can't be that trying, right?

Re:Finally

[emaname]

That instantly disqualifies him for management or political office.

We may need a new mod rating for statements like this: ie, sad but true.

Re:Finally

[Psiren]

It's a shame when competent people get wasted in management.

I see these type of comments a lot, and I really don't get it. You think it would be better to have an incompetent person in management? You know what? Management is hard! I've been a manager for several years now, having stepped up from system administration when my predecessor left. Dealing with people is much harder than dealing with technology. You can't just google how to fix someone when they've got a problem. There's no reset button on a person. You have to figure it out, and work at it. Rarely do I leave the office and stop thinking about the problems I have to deal with the next day. Especially so when it's a sensitive or emotional issue.

I've had my share of poor managers, and they're not easy to deal with. I regard myself as pretty competent, and I strive to be a good manager, but like you, I'm a person and I sometimes make mistakes. Dealing with the repercussions of that isn't always easy. I've had to deal with accidents, serious illness, family bereavement, depression, infighting, poor performance, politics (oh God, the politics!) and a whole host of other things I wouldn't or couldn't list here. Dealing with a broken server or some dodgy code is a doddle in comparison.

Often it's a case of just taking the responsibility to make a decision. Even if the employee has come to the correct solution, they want someone else to carry it forwards. They can then go away, confident that if it all goes tits up, I'll be there to pick up the pieces and protect them from the shit heading their way.

I love the job, I really do. I feel it's more of a challenge than I ever had as a sysadmin. I'm not making light of the work that the technical guys do in any way. We're all links in the chain, and without good management, it does fall apart. I've seen it more times than I care to remember.

Re:stay warm and safe in your bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

One reason we can't say this is because we're reading Slashdot instead of working.

Quote

[Bodhammer]

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. "

-Thomas A. Edison (Privileged White Dude & Climate Denier...) l

which is why everyone can't be a programmer

[OffTheLip]

No matter what the talking heads say about STEM and giving equal opportunity to all. It take real skill, dedication and talent to be a real innovator. Luck comes later.

Re:stay warm and safe in your bubble

[Austerity Empowers]

And we cant just say "fuck it and fuck your bullshit, I'm heads down working"

Actually, you can. In some places just like that. In others possibly "I'm busy, when do you need this by". If you are in a place where you are working hard, and which values your contribution, the message survives the diction. In other places, which talk a lot about technology but really just need glorified MBAs who know how computers work, you probably can't get away with this. Quit.

I think his message is exactly right, and so many companies get lost in the bullshit they are unable to get the job done. Often of course because they have moved into the Wall St. phase of "let the losers of the pyramid game get their money back, if possible".

Any asshole can have an idea, most of technology (or most anything else for that matter) is the hard work. This is also what makes us so hostile towards patents that don't have products behind them.

Re:Perspiration

[Danathar]

Yea, but who likes Thomsas Edison? He was a jerk and an ass.

Re:Perspiration

[DickBreath]

Which is more beneficial to the world.
1. Perspiring while developing code that is freely donated to anyone, and which has found its way into gadgets and devices all around us.
or
2. Perspiring while doing an insane monkey dance screaming developers, Developers, DEVELOPERS.

You decide.

Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger

[DickBreath]

To summarize, I think you are saying Linux is not innovative because it is like Unix, which was already around.

Here's the thing. Technical comparisons aside, Linux did something that none of the Unixes could do.

Linux was open source. That caused a huge development kick start which would be the envy of the private fiefdoms of proprietary closed Unix.

Linux then became cross platform. That causes Linux to run anywhere that the C compiler could run. Again, the envy of closed platforms.

Those two things combined make Linux suddenly attractive to anyone needing to build a software system on a non-PC platform. Or even on a PC platform where OS licensing is an issue. Applications like: smart phones. GPS navigators. TV set top DVRs. Streaming internet TV boxes. Digital cameras. Smart TVs. In car entertainment systems. Digital signage and billboard display applications. Chromecast type sticks. Amazon Echo type devices. And the list just goes on and on and on.

So, is Linux innovative? I believe so. And where all those proprietary Unixes? In the proprietary tarpit. Even Microsoft is realizing that it can't avoid operating with open source and Linux. BTW, Wine now runs on Windows Subsystem for Linux.

The work is more important than the idea

[sjbe]

To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s.

Just because someone did some work decades ago and had the nugget of an idea doesn't mean anything. The work still needed to be done to actually bring the idea to reality. There are few things more annoying than someone who thinks the idea is everything and that the implementation is just trivial details.

Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born.

And yet none of them were available to me for the majority of my life. Why is that? It's because nobody had gotten around to the hard work of turning into something actually useful.

It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.

Software patents are absurd because they patent a mathematical formula. They also are absurd because the software industry moves WAY too fast for a 20+ year monopoly to be a sensible reward. Finally they are absurd because they do not cover the implementation of an idea but the idea itself and thus all possible permutations of said idea. That's not what patents are supposed to be for.

Re:Perspiration

[Anonymous Coward]

And his 1% inspiration was from standing on the shoulders of Nikola Tesla...

But...but...look what I invented!!!

[bradley13]

It's round! It rolls! You could use it to transport things! I think I'll call it...the wheel.

Example: I just saw a presentation involving a new ORM framework today - same old idea, same crappy ORM efficiency, why am I supposed to be impressed? How many ORM frameworks do we need? They all do the same damned thing, and all of them do it badly. By the time you have the latest and greatest innovative framework working in your project (having had to mangle to your architecture to compensate for the horrible inefficiency), you could have achieved the same end - cleaner, faster, and with less code - by doing without the framework.

Pick your topic: development methodologies, programming languages, frameworks, whatever: The whole IT branch seems to have institutional amnesia. Each new generation of programmers (i.e., every 5-10 years) rediscovers it all, plasters on new buzzwords, and pats themselves on the back for their cleverness. /rant

Re:stay warm and safe in your bubble

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also why so many "tech" companies want to hire young kids straight out of school - they are too naive to see through the marketing nonsense, so they buy into it.

As far as I am concerned, the whole dot-com insanity was the worst thing to happen for tech ... ever. It gave rise to the hype-over-fact culture that we are now saddled with, and the kids who grew up through it don't know enough history to see through the smoke screen. So now we have people more concerned with buzz words than substance, more concerned with what is "new" than what works and somehow convinced that "innovation" is achieved in weeks or months instead of years or decades (mostly because they know so little that they are not aware of what has been done before and how almost all of the innovative/disruptive technology is just rehashing stuff that has been around for decades.

re: Edison

[King_TJ]

You know, when you read about Edison growing up as a kid, it's clear he had some issues. Maybe he was Asperger's? That would explain his willingness to stubbornly sit there trying material after material to find a suitable filament to make a working light bulb.

Steve Jobs is also often described as "a jerk and an ass", yet it's clear he had some great ideas and was able to not only build a computer company that went head-to-head against Microsoft, but brought it back from the dead when he took it back over again for the second time.

A lot of people running companies are perceived as jerks. Some of that is probably warranted, but maybe it's ALSO because they focus so much on making the company a success? Most "rank and file" employees only care about the paycheck, or doing the little piece of the whole puzzle they're hired to do. If something bad for the company but good for them happens, they're probably pleased about it. The business owner who created it as his "baby" from the ground up? Not so much.

Torvalds is right, IMO, embracing Edison's quote. The people who pretend it's not so are just the ones at the top who can take all the credit for that 99% perspiration of others they hired to implement an idea.

Bullshit infects Innovation.

[geekmux]

The problem is not innovation itself, but more what we're defining as innovation.

When a person can act like a complete fucking idiot on YouTube and amass a billion look-at-this-dumbass clicks resulting in a six-figure salary, I'd say that says a lot about what is "innovative" today. Don't even get me started on reality TV.

The scary part is watching Wall Street get high as a kite off the innovation fumes as they drool over shit like Snapchat, who loses hundreds of millions every year and arrogantly brags how they may never become profitable, defying all common sense with a multi-billion dollar IPO valuation.

Not that we have any.bomb evidence of what happens when bullshit infects innovation...

Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger

[DickBreath]

I watched the development of micro computers in the 1970's. Try re-reading BYTE (and other) magazines of the era. The technology was shockingly primitive. No standardization. The first standardization was around hardware, the 8080 and the S-100 bus. Still no significant software standardization because every system had some cobbled together custom keyboard / display or printer setup. Find a used keyboard from a liquidator, figure out it's circuit board layout, write your own custom interface software, etc. It wasn't until 1977 that the holy trinity arrived (TRS-80, Apple II and Commodore Pet). The first standard off-the-shelf computers. This was where you started to see some commercial software take hold. Just watch the ads in the magazines.

Now to the point.

I am ignoring Unix until a time when it was practical for most people to actually run it. The early 1990's when Linus created Linux was the perfect time. And at that time all of the Unixes were walled off proprietary prison camps and ran on workstations that at that time cost a couple tens of thousands of dollars. Linux ran on a common PC. By the mid to late 90's some people were noticing that you could run Linux on a souped up PC for ten grand and replace a thirty grand Unix box.

If Linux hadn't come along, Unix would be something in obscurity.

Here we are today where you can get Linux on a Raspberry Pi for $35 with 1 GB of ram, gigabytes of SD card storage, 4 core processor, etc. And proprietary unix is relatively obscure.

That makes Linux sure seem innovative to me. It obviously did something VERY right. So much that now Microsoft can no longer ignore it.

99% theft, 1% kernel

[emptybody]

>> "All that hype is not where the real work is," said Torvalds. "The real work is in the details."
>> Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation.

this is because Linux took 99% of its innovation from others and then had the 1% kernel.