Welcome to the 72th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Assholes. In this edition, we enumerate the various ways in which assholes are thriving; in the Library section, we review a hallmark business book by Robert Sutton with the word "assholes" in the title; and in our Vidéothèque section, we learn from Donnie Berkholz how assholes almost drove the Gentoo project to the ground.
If we had to choose just one profession that falls into the cult of the asshole, software craftsmanship (call it engineering or development) would certainly come to mind. Writing code is ripe to endless, serial, toxic demonstrations of manhood, bundled together with an endless admiration for those historical figures (usually referred to as "pundits" or "moguls") who show certain supposedly manly traits.
Let us see a practical (and sad) example of how assholes can bring a software development project to its knees, in this case, Gentoo Linux, a very popular distribution during the pre-Ubuntu years from 2002 to 2006, at which point the project lost almost 20% of their developers in the space of a few years. Why did this happen?
Every so often this magazine drifts away from the coverage of classic programming titles because its main objective is to stretch the brains of software practitioners towards other areas of knowledge, such as design, sociology, or science. Business books are one such area, and we should be covering more of those. But today we will talk about one that could rightfully be called the most important business book of the 21st century so far.