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

[DickBreath]

That instantly disqualifies him for management or political office.

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

[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

[Kagato]

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.

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

[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.

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.

Innovation is sooo last year....

[TexasTroy]

Get with the times - you have to be disruptive now.

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

[__aaclcg7560]

"Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." - Thomas Edison

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/14/genius-ratio/

Re:Perspiration

[Danathar]

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

Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Innovation

[orasio]

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.

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:Myopia...

[BarbaraHudson]

Ideas are two for a quarter. REALIZED ideas might have merit.

F*cking inflation. Back in my day they were a dime a dozen :-)

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:stay warm and safe in your bubble

[pla]

Which is why they want kids to "learn computers" in Kindergarten.

...And keep failing miserably.

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.

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.

Re: Innovation

[lgw]

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.

Re:Linus is a dumb ditch digger

[fibonacci8]

386BSD initial release: March 12, 1992 Linux initial release: September 17, 1991 Unless you're suggesting Linux wasn't bootable for about half a year after it was released, your claim is false.