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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.
Torvalds said he subscribes to the view that successful projects are 99 per cent perspiration, and one per cent innovation. 'The real work is in the details'
As is often the case, Linus presents his rather myopic view thinking that it applies to all of IT. There's no doubt that there is an awful amount of bullshit going around in IT on the subject of innovation. It may also be true that many successful projects only have a 1% innovation component in them, but those are probably not very innovative projects. Such projects actually tend not not spend a lot of time on details, certainly not at first, because that's not where you succeed or fail; you need to understand which details are important and focus only on those. If you think innovation is just another project that needs getting done, then you don't understand what innovation is. For starters, a good innovator knows which ideas to pursue, what to turn into a POC or a project, how to evaluate those projects on an ongoing basis, and when to quit. And if you, as an innovator, never quit and bring all your projects to conclusion and launch, then you are most likely not casting your nets wide enough.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s. Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born. 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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Linux os not full of innovation.
It's full of great work, executed properly.
I was not a believer. I hated the fact that he was pushing such an outdated design for a kernel.
Yet he proved that great execution of an existing idea is much more valuable and has a much greater impact (worldwide, long lasting impact) than a beautiful, innovative design.
Innovation, invention and discovery are certainly important and can allow us to more easily or efficiently address needs, but when we are talking about "innovation" or innovative people most of the time what we are really talking about is creative problem solving using already existing methods, knowledge and technology.
It is easy to look at IT and see how real innovations have contributed to a transformation of many aspects of society over the last half century and then fall into the cult of innovation as a sort of belief in perpetual innovation as a means for the betterment of society. But both a longer view and more critical view of our day to day society should confirm the importance of understanding that you already have many of the technological tools and methods needed to address today's needs. And a good application of those already known technological tools and methods should be the priority of problem solving rather than innovation merely for the sake of innovation.
Surely there is always a need for innovation, especially in medicine where virus are constantly evolving to maximize their contagion and our existing tools need to be adapted to new challenges. But in other technology areas the problem domain does not change as remarkably over time. And already developed technology is well suited for most day to day challenges.
Sure you can probably cite a thousand different examples where today's technology is inadequate to a problem or need, but I think the point is that it is no less noble or worthy to address the tens of thousands of those other problems and human needs that can be worked on without the need for any fundamental innovation.
No doubt, the earlier we expose kids to real programming (as opposed to the drag-and-drop programming equivalent of the old Radio Shack "hundred-in-one electronics projects" kits that Code.org keeps touting as some sort of mythical progress), the higher quality programmers we'll eventually turn out; but that doesn't mean you'll see a substantial increase in the number of people who can, and can stand to, code.
Early exposure might mean a few more people realize they have what it takes to code, but programming is hard, despite all the rose-scented farts Google, Microsoft et al keep encouraging us to sniff. The vast majority or people have neither the aptitude nor the patience to ever master the relevant skills.
The Core Linux crap he leads doesn't innovate per se. It doesn't have to. It needs to be stable, consistent and performant. The work they do is important, but it's built on the shoulders of giants like Dennis Ritchie. What's innovative in Linux is the social and collaborative construct. But it's not like those are new ideas.
Beautiful designs are generally bad. They get taken to the extreme; and you get shit like xml.
XML was pretty awesome ... as a markup language for books and other natural language documents. It was a wonderful tamed version of SGML. Then some crazy people started using it blindly as a object serialization language.
The odd thing is, you can write terse XML for object serialization (just slightly more verbose than CSV!) but no one did. Instead you got the most verbose approach to serialization imaginable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.