I used to believe that most programming and open source communities were meritocracies, but it sounds like the people I'm around don't believe that anymore.
When did this start? Where did it come from? Is this unique to the Ruby community or are others saying that?
Self-promotion has always been important. The degree of importance depends on your goals.
If you want fame, you have to self-promote. If you want high rates and the choicest jobs, you have to self-promote. If you want to work on interesting problems and make a living doing it, you have to self-promote.
If you just want to hack on stuff that turns you on in your spare time, then self-promotion is optional. But who doesn't like a _little_ recognition? I don't think the open source community would exist without that drive.
I think self-promotion should be grounded in merit. I would hope the people I respect that might dismissed as "just really good at self promotion" are actually good at what they do.
Sorry for the rambly answer.
The problem with taking the attitude of "its all about recognition" is it ignores the fact that (a) other people are willing to take credit for stuff you do and (b) others might take the stuff you did in a direction you don't like.
On the first point it shouldn't be news to anyone that there are people who will take credit for things they didn't do. The way those people succeed is by finding things that were done by people who "just want to hack stuff" and then claiming they did it instead.
On my second point people who have a claim to helping with your work can hijack it if you don't take your proper credit. Many problems with RSS came from the fact that Dave Winer claimed ownership of it and took it in a completely different direction from its RDF roots. I don't want to rehash that technical argument but that fact remains most of the people who followed Winer did so because they thought he "invented RSS" (or "was the Father of..."). The reason people thought that is because Ramanathan Guha didn't self promote like Winer did.
So there are consequences to self-promotion that extend beyond one's personal recognition. If you don't take the credit and leadership role due to you someone else often times will.
I'm willing to bet that the people lobbing the thinly veiled insults do so because that's easier than putting their stuff out there and having it ripped to shreds by other people lobbing thinly veiled (or not so thinly-veiled) insults.
I've been to enough conferences and been in enough backchannels to see the kind of people who never get up in front of crowds and share what they know sit there are rip on the experience level or presentation skills of those that are putting themselves out there.
My feeling is that if you're not into self-promotion and you don't like the fame then that's very cool of you, but looking down on others for wanting to make a name for themselves is not cool.
Self-promotion is like make-up, best is the one which doesn't stand-out.
Writing open source is good example, speaking at a conference (as long as you educate, not speak about yourself) is too. But when you add info about your availability and "contact me" call to action to your Github profile or "I'm doing consulting services at..." as the lasts presentation slide - people suddenly notice the self-promotion.
Is it unique to the Ruby community? Certainly not, but if you find yourself around a better class of people, you may notice that they're not Ruby developers ;-)
Comments like that say more about you than about Ruby developers, winking punctuation or not.
People cannot judge you on your merits unless they know you exist and what you've done. Stand up and be counted.
Now, there is the case that some people assign special value to other people by virtue of their being known, and don't bother to find out why someone is known. TV is filled with people who are famous for being famous. Maybe some tech circles are like that, too.
I've had people look to hire me who mention that they were Googling for something or other and my name kept coming up, so they figured I was the person to contact. Far be it from me to to discourage such people :).
But I also know that the bottom line is you have to live up to these people's expectations.
In some cases people may look down on this behavior (see your friends), this may lead those who participate in it to justify the behavior as necessary (see actors).
In other cases it may be quite necessary for their source of income (see motivational speakers, underemployed consultants).
I suppose you'd have to decide for yourself which category these folks might belong in.
Seeing an uptick there might be the result of the heat currently in the sector. The behavior certainly did seem to peak in 99/00 with the last market bubble. Anecdotally, self promoters often seem to flock to over heated sectors - people that aren't johnny come latelies may just be getting caught up by seeing others do it.
Last year at LaRubyConf, Sarah Allen called the ruby community "the programming community for extroverts". I couldn't agree more.
I think your analysis of the community is more a result of that than any level of pomposity, vainness, or even simple hand-waving. Sure, those things will always occur to some extent. But I think it's really a result of positive attributes, and maybe a dash of success ;)
I also think people's attitudes towards engineers have changed markedly in more recent years. Gone are the days of nerdy dudes updating bank software in "Office Space". Who is everyone's favorite CEO these days? Steve Jobs. What was one of the biggest blockbuster hits of the year? A movie about a nerdy dude at Harvard building a web app (I know, that's not what the movie is really about). In other words, it's fucking cool to be an engineer these days, especially a software engineer.
I think ruby programmers, being extroverts (generally), have embraced this cultural shift, and dare I say capitalized on it.
I can't deny that people in the ruby community have ample opportunity to become "rockstars" in the community simply by way of self-promotion, but there are just as many of those who are popular for their prolific open source contributions, which is by no means hurt by their self-promotion prowess.
Good observation bj, and great conversation starter.
