Craziness Considered Irrelevant

ENTP has some of the best programmers in the Rails community. I'm lucky to be a part of a group like this. Some companies organize around best practices and competent coders. That's great, but it's not enough - it's middle-of-the-road. ENTP's more like the Avengers or the Justice League: a team of unusual people who rock at their individual specialities.

Recently I posted something controversial on my personal blog, and somebody criticized ENTP on Twitter in response. That's unjustified. My views go on my blog, and ENTP's views go on ENTP's blog. I think anybody who uses the Internet understands this. If you need it clarified, consider that the same page on my blog where my rant appeared also featured a blog post entitled Cannibal Baby: The Love Story. That is not an ENTP-sponsored post either.

Courtenay, ENTP's founder, gives this as his official position:

I formed ENTP after reading a book, Lucky or Smart? by Bo Peabody. It's a tiny book, and really you only need to read the first chapter. Following his inspiration, I went out to find the smartest motherf*ckers in my field, get them together, and let them do their thing.

We give people a free reign to do pretty much whatever they want: that's the point. Recently Giles wrote some batshit crazy post, on his own blog. Some people thought that it reflected poorly on our company. I had a much longer post written, but the summary of it is this: we know that Giles is crazy, we knew that when we hired him. Giles is a foundry of many, many awesome ideas. He also has some terrible ones. The opinions and words he writes on his own blog are his alone, and while I personally disagree with some of them, his good ideas are really good, and he's a valuable asset to our company.

Courtenay isn't the only person at ENTP to disagree with my controversial stance. Only one person at ENTP said that they thought any part of my post seemed even slightly reasonable at all. Even if they had agreed, it would have had nothing to do with the company. Like Courtenay says, I have a reputation for taking controversial stances and creating innovative projects. They hired me for the innovation, and they knew they'd have to take the crazy along with it.