10 ms·

Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

• dimgl 10y ago
  Interesting article. Definitely something to keep in mind when hiring. It's crazy how much damage one person can do to a team (and vice-versa, I've seen one person change entire team dynamics). It's also really important to be careful with jerks who think they are brilliant, even if they are. There's always someone smarter out there and clever solutions aren't always the best solutions if no one can understand them.
  • watwut 10y ago
    Alternatively, we could stop forcing the jerks to work in tightly cooperative teams. Their skills might have been useful if they would be allowed to work mostly alone.
• fuzzy2 10y ago
  It's all about chemistry. Without it, work isn't fun. In this case, removing him helped restore it, so that's good. There may be teams that can take a jerk, perhaps with a "handler" (in the team).
• urahara 10y ago
  Definitely. Still the case in the post represents a very soft version of the type, comparing to who you can really come across at work.
• technologyvault 10y ago
  It's never fun to have a jerk on your team, no matter how good he is at what he does. True brilliance includes the ability to recognize and govern how you are affecting others.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  In my experience this type of person can only exist in your organization if their manager is below average. I have come across my share of them and every time if their manager was a dud the whole company suffered, if their manager was on the ball they would put structure around the jerk to achieve a net improvement in productivity without the negativity.
  • whatupmd 10y ago
    This has been my experience as well, if the manager does not stay on top of it the person is toxic. With sufficient incentives, they can be managed to lift up the team.
  • FLUX-YOU 10y ago
    It's always possible the brilliant jerk is just being taken advantage of so his boss can take it easy. Exploiting ego isn't hard and you don't need to be better than him at his own game to do it. If his manager is insulated from the rest of you, it's probably not worth enduring the brilliant jerk though.
  • xiaoma 10y ago
    Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Elison and Jeff Bezos each nurtured that sort of person (and were themselves that sort of person). They utterly steamrolled the kinder and gentler companies in their respective markets. Sometimes reality and what you want to be true are not the same.
    • astrodust 10y ago
      Their personalities could not be more different. Their approach to business and life are completely orthogonal.
      • xiaoma 10y ago
        And yet all ran cultures where jerks thrived in engineering (or sales in Oracle's case).
        • astrodust 10y ago
          Oracle has burned so many bridges they're living on an island of their own creation.
          • hinkley 10y ago
• alexc05 10y ago
  I read articles like this somethings and think "holy shit I hope I'm not a jerk" - but then I relax when I realize I'm not brilliant enough for that to matter.
  • throwawaymsft 10y ago
    If you're conscientious enough to ask the question you don't have to worry about being a jerk :).
  • obilgic 10y ago
    Well the real problem is if you are a jerk without being brilliant. ..
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • kristopolous 10y ago
    I think jerks come at all levels. I hope I'm not one either.
• whenwillitstop 10y ago
  When the product is truly technically innovative you need this people. When you are building CRUD apps, not so much.
• mjfl 10y ago
  It just sounds like that person was not a good match for the company culture. Many shops will appreciate that kind of drive and attention to detail, as well as the ability to tolerate potentially biting criticism that comes with it. I would have happily hired him away from the author's company.
  • jimktrains2 10y ago
    > ability to tolerate potentially biting criticism that comes with it I wonder if this is the issue really. Some people can't take criticism unless wrapped in sugar. If it's really, and especially if it comes with potential alternatives it should be socially fine, but it's not.
    • treebeard901 10y ago
      Another aspect is how the rest of the team felt over time. They probably built up deep resentment towards this person which ultimately only fed back into the cycle. So whether or not they were aware of it, they probably formed a clique to team up against this person, again only exacerbating the core issue.
      • thomasrognon 10y ago
        The article claimed he was a 10x and that he was usually right in any disagreement, so he probably built up resentment towards them, too.
  • watwut 10y ago
    Nothing in that story suggest ability to tolerate potentially biting criticism from other people. The story suggest ability to dish it out. The dude presented opinions and preferences as facts. Is there any reason to think he would easily accept when one of juniors called him on it? Because if he would be able to accept the criticism, one of colleges would be able to convince him that some of his criticism is wrong. To me it sounds more like he used the biting criticism to keep the "top dog" position. People who can tolerate potentially biting criticism wont present preferences as facts all that much, because there would learn from people criticizing them for that in the past.
• desireco42 10y ago
  Honestly, I was always happy to have good developers. The better you are, the bigger pain in the but you can be, as far as I am concerned as long as the code you are delivering is excellent. I am perfectly happy to work around your quirks, within reason of course. And, of course you will be a jerk when you are seeing things others just can't and they can't understand you. After a while you lose patience. What good developer can bring to a team is more valuable then 3-4 polite junior devs that have enthusiasm (which I value also highly) but can't produce quality stuff. So two essential qualities in my view are: being really good, have excellent foundations and being open to learning and coaching if you don't have those.
  • jostmey 10y ago
    I think it is important to match coworkers by their caliber. You're right, if you have one really amazing developer and a bunch of mediocre developers that one really good developer could become bitter.
    • stevens32 10y ago
      Seems like the case here, if someone is leaving hundreds of opinion-based criticisms of someone else's work that's a pretty clear indication of dissatisfaction.
  • Bahamut 10y ago
    That's where mentorship comes into play - mentoring the rest of the team has greater effects than trying to plow through code over the long haul. The reason is that it creates a silo that the one high producer gets saddled with, and it creates a bottleneck that ultimately probably will even result in the high producer becoming unhappy due to being distracted with all of the maintenance burden from his/her code. I used to be more of the former type who would try to power through everything & still display flashes of it whenever I do have to code, but after being a lead engineer for almost a year, I understand more deeply the value of knowledge transfer and making everyone more productive. Having a team that is genuinely happy to work together has an effect of creating more for the company than the sum of their parts because the team is more honest with each other from being comfortable/not having to fear reprisal, which results in better (& planned) team architecture, mistakes being caught as early as possible, and overall decreased stress.
• abraae 10y ago
  > A “No Jerks” Policy Must Be Built Into Your Culture. It is entirely possible to be extremely passionate (and even brilliant) without being a jerk. A “no jerks” policy must be preached and practiced from the highest levels. Following simplistic rules like this is usually what leaves us knee deep in the proverbial. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never worked with anyone who's as much of a jerk as described in the article. In my experience, talented developers are usually intelligent enough that they can make up for their shortcoming in the social area by consciously adapting their behaviour. They're not "normal" but they function well enough to work with others. I've worked with plenty of jerk-ish, abrasive, opiniated, "take no prisoners" people who can be very fiery in meetings and can be highly critical of other people's work. Yes, they can be a giant pain in the arse - they're just so damn challenging. But in my experience they're normally challenging because they want the company to do better. But I've seen many times (mainly in large companies) teams that were populated and led by people who were very consensus-based, had superb social skills, and had a genuine drive to succeed - but didn't because there was not enough fire in the team to make the right choices. To me, the business of software development is way too complex to apply a simple "no jerks" policy. Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.
  • Waterluvian 10y ago
    Hey that's me! I had a frustrating moment the other day where a colleague said that float(5) was more explicit and personally preferred in Python than a literal 5.0 I realised I was being pedantic but I genuinely believed in "good craftsmanship" when I really pushed him to change it. I need to get better at this because the social friction I caused may cost more than the poor craftsmanship. But the other part of me is thinking, "c'mon man... Seriously?"
    • andreyz4k 10y ago
      By the way, float(5) is slower, because it creates two objects instead of one.
      • Waterluvian 10y ago
• EpicEng 10y ago
  No they don't; mediocre 'nice guys' do though. Every 'brilliant jerk' I've worked with and led has been a net positive over the long haul. Every mediocre nice guy has been dead weight that costs everyone around them time. I'll take the brilliant jerk any day. They can simply deliver in ways that others cannot.
  • omni 10y ago
    > I'll take the brilliant jerk [over the mediocre nice guy] any day. Holy false dichotomy, Batman. I'd rather take neither of them and fill my team with adequate-to-exceptional devs who also happen to be decent human beings.
    • phaed 10y ago
      Nice false trichotomy there, Joker. I'd rather have brilliant developers who are also decent human beings.
    • Chris2048 10y ago
      > I'd rather take neither of them and.. I'd rather drive a Ferarri.
      • throwaway729 10y ago
        Are brilliant & nice people really as rare as y'all seem to be suggesting? That's not my experience at all.
        • Chris2048 10y ago
          If brilliant means not mediocre, or above average, they are as rare as they are common. Depends how your budget stretches; If it doesn't, you have to make do.
          • throwaway729 10y ago
            I tend to err on the side of EpicEng here. Those people are readily available and you're just not paying enough.
• endorphone 10y ago
  The bit about improved productivity seems dubious. One of the problems in this industry is that a lot of teams have no real measure of their actual productivity. We have scrums and points and velocities, but seldom have any way to know how this actually compares to other teams, or any other benchmarks. I've been dropped in on teams that had spent long periods (in cases years) creating trivial solutions. They were productive in their own way, generating huge volumes of code, had a great sense of satisfaction about their process and a sense of accomplishment, but what they were creating was a week of work for a single person if correctly built. And they happily enjoy their synergy until they are outsourced or eclipsed by competitors. Maybe I'm sensitive. I've been "the jerk" before. I once had a coworker complain to HR and my boss because she felt that I was domineering. I was domineering in this case because I had opinions and expressed them to the team, and their opinion and suggestion of a new process was that we should have "opinion roundtables" where each participant gets the same amount of time to talk with a timer, etc, and need to suppress any suggestions or opinions outside of that period. I left that team and organization, and eight months later the team was fired.
  • watwut 10y ago
    Following combination would slow them down: "Where a normal review would often contain a handful of comments and suggestions, he would regularly end up in the hundreds." with "Most of the comments were opinion and personal preference. [...] He never took the opportunity to teach or mentor. He just stated his opinions as fact." That sort of behavior generates a lot of work to the rest of the team - time spend changing the code, time spent discussion opinions and trying proactively writing the code in way that will pass his review. Time spent being confused over why this or that was wrong again (since it was not wrong actually). If those less experienced people feared him, which is likely, they spent a lot of time attempting to anticipate his opinions and preferences (while sacrificing their own opinions and preferences even when they were right). Moreover, people like him would cause other experienced people to leave. While junior might be fine with being expected to submissively conform to someone elses preferences that much, experienced person wont. "You are doing it wrong" might work on junior, but not on someone who knows that he is not doing it wrong. Anyone who is willing or wanting to take on responsibility would leave. Yet moreover, he likely regularly shot down good ideas of other people, which would make those other people more passive. It is the same effect as why micromanagement has.
• ar15saveslives 10y ago
  If the guy was so good, why didn't they promote him?
  • falsedan 10y ago
    Individual Contributors gotta contribute individually
• bry 10y ago
  Also relevant: http://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/why-netflix-doesn-t-tolerate-brilliant-jerks.html http://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/why-netflix-doesn-t-tolera...
• funkymike 10y ago
  On the subject of making code reviews a positive experience I think it has been helpful where I work to explicitly discuss code reviews. What makes a good code review vs. a bad one. For example the idea that code review comments should be based on the substance of the code rather than style. This stuck out to me as I tend to be very critical in code reviews, which I think made other developers uncomfortable. By talking about it though I was able to soften my approach. I was also able to make sure my language came across as reviewing the code, not the developer.
• w00tw00tw00t 10y ago
  to call anyone a "jerk" is something that only jerks do, but everyone looks at themselves as holier than thou. We're all flawed in some way. Labeling people (or attacking people) as "jerks" is in profound violation the principle of non-violent communication, to say the least, and, by the way, so is down-voting those who are critical of the prevailing opinion here without a civil counter argument ;-)
  • wott 10y ago
    > to call anyone a "jerk" is something that only jerks do What about people who call "jerks" people who call someone a jerk? :-D
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • w00tw00tw00t 10y ago
      recursion limit of 0 on this stack!
  • sokoloff 10y ago
    Here's the thing: some people are jerks. Calling a jerk a jerk is fine, IMO. (Some people are racists; calling a racist a racist is also OK.) Avoiding calling someone exhibiting a negative behavior by the accepted label for that behavior is healthier than tiptoeing around and pretending that Hannibal Lecter just has different dietary preferences and that's OK.
    • w00tw00tw00t 10y ago
      If not Hitler than Hannibal Lecter My point is that we're all jerks, one way or another, just don't really know it or admit to it, but we know that everyone has done something that warrants them being called a jerk by someone. No one lives a whole life without being called a jerk by someone. I once thought Mother Theresa was a jerk for being so nice. These labels are subjective and inflammatory. and don't help the situation.
• xiaoma 10y ago
  > "He could crank out 10 times as much work as any of us could in one day." If this is true, it sounds like the best option would have been firing the rest of the team and looking for another like him.
  • jldugger 10y ago
    No matter how much two such folks might deserve one another, I'm not sure companies could afford to watch their final two coders refuse to cooperate over trivial shit like line length.
    • manigandham 10y ago
      Is that the definition of "jerk" now?
  • seoknucklehead 10y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. There are diminishing returns with most jerks if they are marginally better than the rest of the team, but if they are 10x better, maybe you just need a team of 1.
    • phil21 10y ago
      One of my favorite interview stories was when I was interviewing for a very low-level dev position at a major telecom. I was interviewing to become member #8 or so on this team. It was for writing dial-up internet billing software, essentially grant/deny access and provide hours connected to the dial-in banks. Nothing all that crazy, a pretty solved problem honestly by that point. I asked them what they were replacing and why. The team lead got super excited and talked about how they were hired on to replace a single guy who had wrote a ~1000 line Perl script that pretty much handled this whole data import job. This guy apparently made the cardinal sin of using moderately complex regex in his tooling, and that was a sign of how incompetent he was and how the tooling obviously needed to be replaced wholesale. They did not get the irony of this situation whatsoever when I made the obvious statement of why it took an 8 man team over 12 months so far to replace a single dude with a 1000 line Perl script. Absolutely saw nothing wrong with the situation whatsoever. Thankfully I ended up not taking that job and starting my own company instead :)
• latenightcoding 10y ago
  I honestly enjoy working with those "brilliant jerks", if they are actually brilliant I will learn from them. And debating with them is very entertaining.
  • astrodust 10y ago
    There's a difference between a cantankerous curmudgeon and being an asshole.
  • phaed 10y ago
    Same, it accelerates your growth. Can you believe OP? There he has a brilliant dev taking his valuable time to critique his and other people's mediocre work, and all he gets for it is self-protective and defensive reactions from everyone else. OP has admitted that the brilliant jerk had good reasons behind all his comments, yet here he is still complaining about it (ego much?).
• cateye 10y ago
  This could be turned around: Nice Mediocre People Cost More Than They Are Worth. I've seen a lot that socially desirable behavior is evaluated and preferred rather than people doing excellent work. Group dynamics quickly exclude these by creating a consensus of what is accepted and what the goal of the group is. This is especially easy because these brilliant people are always -by definition- a minority,
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    This is just a strawman. No one is suggesting that you should hire mediocre people instead.
• avip 10y ago
  We're in the business of shipping working things on time. I'd take the "brilliant jerk" over most alternatives. Grow up, ignore the jerkness, and enjoy the code. Seriously - great developers are so rare anyhow.
  • st3v3r 10y ago
    Can't the same advice be given to the jerk? Grow up and stop being a jerk? And really, if we're in the business of shipping working things on time, do you think it's a good idea to keep someone on who's going to bring down the rest of your team, or drive them away?
• altoz 10y ago
  If he really was a 10x engineer and it was a "small team" (say 6 people), wouldn't firing the other 5 have been the better move?
  • Arwill 10y ago
    Sometimes yes, but there is the question of budget. If that was a project or contracting work, and the client can be sold 6 people, then it looks like bigger work, and can be charged more. If you just put one brilliant dev to do it, the client might not be convinced that the job is as big as you tell him. Sometimes devs are put on projects just to "sit it trough", they are needed for the headcount.
• analogwzrd 10y ago
  My first senior engineer was a "brilliant" jerk. He had decades of experience, but when I started digging into his work I realized that he was useful mainly because he was offering solutions to problems that he created. I've heard some people say that a good engineer will eliminate the need for his/her own job. This guy was actively creating a need for himself by causing problems without management realizing it. About 1 out of every 10 ideas was a good idea, but you had to know how to filter out the bad ones. If you said "no" to one of his bad ideas, he'd say that you weren't listening to his input and complain to your manager. He was abrasive, condescending, and dominated every meeting. If you said anything to management, their response was "Oh that's just Bob, what a crazy, quirky, eccentric guy!" What they refused to realize was that being Bob's peer was very different than working for Bob. What management perceived as a quirk, was a character flaw that made life hell for anyone working underneath Bob. And to echo other comments, nothing was done about Bob because management didn't want to take responsibility for the culture of the company. Why risk negatively impacting profits by actually managing your employee when you could blame it on millennials being whiny and you believe that engineers are interchangeable?
• kbuchanan 10y ago
  While I don't doubt the author's employer did the right thing – to fire the individual – I think the subsequent logic (e.g. guard against "jerks" at all costs!) is a dangerous train of thought, one which is more likely to pigeon-hole human beings. In reality, no person is "simply a jerk". Each of us sits somewhere on a spectrum of intolerance towards others for one reason or another. It's healthy to learn how to work with people of all stripes – even individuals who can, at times, be abrasive.
• hug 10y ago
  If this article were actually true, Apple wouldn't exist as the company it is today. Steve Jobs, while not a developer, was undoubtedly brilliant, and most definitely a jerk. It's unhelpful to pigeonhole people and then extrapolate out their actions from there, because for the most part people don't conform to whatever mental model of that stereotype you've built in your head. People are complex beyond imagining. Besides, what's the author's sample size here? One? Two? It's an anecdote worth relating, to be sure, but I think it'd be better served by leaving the "Brilliant Jerk" bit out, and leaving it as a story about team morale being more important than the contributions of any single team member.
  • novembermike 10y ago
    I think the argument is that most guys like Jobs or Gates aren't jerks. They might be a little abrasive but people often want to work with them over long periods of time.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• athenot 10y ago
  Maybe it's just me but most truly brilliant people with whom I've worked, have been the opposite: very nice. They were not only smart in their own field but also smart on an emotional level. They were the kind of people you wanted to be around, and they were constantly learning from other brilliant people, recognizing that a bad personality creates friction to learning.
  • achikin 10y ago
    Maybe that is because you're positive and open-minded enough to concentrate on their good qualities and not to perceive them in passive-agressive way as 'jerks'? :)
• TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
  I have never had a good job. Most of my life has been miserable working in QA and not finding any value in anything I do or being able to find something better. This currently leads me to where I am today, working at a huge corp in a pool of mediocrity. The people around me have absolutely no big ambitions to do anything meaningful in life and are very comfortable with their mediocre kids. These people are happy which is a whole other topic that blows my mind. Because I am constantly around these people, they think of me as mean and condescending. No I am not, I just can't be happy producing shit work in a company that doesn't provide me with any value. When I go home, I am not going to have fun, I am going to work on a project that can help me get away from these people. I don't allow anyone to passively say "tgif" or "its monday" to me as if I agree with their mediocre sentiment. Maybe I am mean and that is why I can't find work, but I rather be mean than mediocre.
  • ktRolster 10y ago
    The real question is, what have you done recently to improve your skillset? If you regularly improve your skills, you won't be in that situation for long.
    • TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
      I don't agree with this. It is really about who you know. I never got a job because of skills
      • ktRolster 10y ago
        Do you not have any skills? lol People want to know you because you have skills. If you don't have any skills or assets, people will drop you like a hot bucket.
        • TheOneTrueKyle 10y ago
          Of course improving skills is always essential in anything in life. That doesn't help you get a job.
• spacemanmatt 10y ago
  The only "10x" developer I have worked with taught me not only a ton about agile teams, but also about the liberal use of interpersonal skills in advancement of that goal. We routinely worked with education administrators (former teachers) who all had classroom experience and professional interpersonal skills training. It was amazing to work with people you could simply expect respect from, even when everyone was well aware of the simmering annoyance and disagreement available below the surface. You just can't build the kind of momentum we saw with people who many any team member feel unsafe in their role.
  • gydfi 10y ago
    I don't believe in 10x developers, but I've seen a lot of 0.1x developers.
    • coss 10y ago
      haha this is brilliant
    • spacemanmatt 10y ago
      I believe I caveated the term enough by putting "10x" in quotes. I don't strictly believe in it either. This guy was great at organizing a team and a full-stack project back when distributed apps on a pure OSS stack was still a bit of an accomplishment.
• bdueicnen 10y ago
  Brilliance is not universally recognized. That is, in this case, very few people can accurately evaluate a programmer's skill. Previously, I thought myself to be exceptionally good at my craft, and I let that define who I was as a person. Recently, however, I reconnected with an old, vagabond friend. No one in his circle could evaluate my programming competence or even cared about it. To them, I was a socially awkward, single-dimensional guy. That really shattered my bubble.
• eonaniis 10y ago
  I've worked with people who think mocking the personalities of developers is a form of team-building. The toxic competitiveness is seen as some kind of incentive for personal growth. Football players are paid to win, not growl.
• partycoder 10y ago
  The book "The No Asshole Rule" covers this topic in length. Not all jerks necessarily brilliant, productive or successful. But the "culture ruining" jerks are the ones that become an example for others to follow, or sabotage people with potential to make room for themselves or their friends.
• bagacrap 10y ago
  "Where a normal review would often contain a handful of comments and suggestions, he would regularly end up in the hundreds" geeze. This is either a ridiculous hyperbole or telling of a more deep-seated problem. You should not regularly be posting changes that have room for hundreds of comments, and if you do post a change that massive, it should not be considered normal to only elicit a "handful" of comments/suggestions. I work in a company with a strong code review culture. When I'm less confident in the correctness of what I'm doing, I'll ask for a review from someone who I know will use a fine-toothed comb. This necessarily means dealing with what seems like personal preference, but that's a small price to pay for added assuredness you're doing the right thing. Some reviewers pretty much just rubber stamp your work. That can be useful if I'm highly comfortable with the code I'm working with, but overall I don't think that is a positive or makes them less of a jerk. If anything, not taking the time to provide meaningful feedback is the jerk move.
• curun1r 10y ago
  I've met two kinds of "brilliant jerks" in my working life. One is insufferable and makes the lives of his (it's usually a he) co-workers such a nightmare that they end up quitting. The other is abrasive but pushes his co-workers to achieve a higher level. I've even worked with one developer who was both and, while I hated every moment of working with him, I'm undoubtedly better at what I do now for having worked with him. When I see opinion pieces like this, my first thought is always of the book "multipliers" which put forward (huge over-simplification) that you should strive to hire people who make their co-workers more productive. A jerk is often a strong individual contributor who detracts from the work of those around him. And to that extent, jerks should be avoided. But when a jerk is also a multiplier, they can drive achievement far greater than what would otherwise be achieved. A good example of this is Steve Jobs who, by all accounts I've read, was a bit of a jerk, was abrasive and demanding, but also pushed his people to achieve amazing things, not just at Apple, but also Next and Pixar. If you avoid the brilliant, jerky multipliers, you just might fail in the most enjoyable way possible.
  • FLUX-YOU 10y ago
    >One is insufferable and makes the lives of his (it's usually a he) co-workers such a nightmare that they end up quitting. The other is abrasive but pushes his co-workers to achieve a higher level. See, the first guy is just a Junior Brilliant Jerk. He's slowly learning and will eventually turn into the Senior Brilliant Jerk if you give him enough time. The Senior Brilliant Jerk is the one that stays just within people's tolerances. But you can't become a Senior without being a Junior first, so sorry, you were just the one to give him some experience. :)
  • notacoward 10y ago
    > I've met two kinds of "brilliant jerks" in my working life. I think this is a key point, along with ianbicking's observation that jerkness is often an environmental (rather than innate) phenomenon. Here's a quote many here might recognize. "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" Substitute "quality" or "progress" for "liberty" and you might see what I'm getting at. Some people are just jerks, full stop, end of story. They won't stop being jerks. They will continue to bring everyone down, so they're best gotten rid of. However, there are others who can exhibit many of the same outward behaviors because of context. Most often, the context is that people aren't listening. In an organization where there's a strong emphasis on empirical results, and even more so in one where there's a strong focus on learning, this "situational jerkness" doesn't occur. On the other hand, when people persist in doing things that are wrong despite every prior proof that it's wrong, others might get frustrated enough with them to start being jerks. Examples from my own experience might include: * Repeatedly deferring fixes to a known serious problem, while resources are devoted to less important things. * Re-submitting the same proposal or patch without fixing already-identified flaws. * Persisting in collaborative anti-patterns such as pulling rank or announcing decisions made without all stakeholders present. I've been a jerk myself, when faced with these kinds of situations. I'd have to be some kind of jerk not to push for change, when experience tells me that the status quo leads to a bad place. Sometimes passive aggression needs to be met with active aggression. When faced with being a jerk for good or a jerk for evil, I'll choose being a jerk for good. It's not a decision to be made lightly, and if it happens often then we're probably back in "permanent jerk" territory, but sometimes it's a decision that needs to be made anyway.
• alexandercrohde 10y ago
  Well, let's look at it from the "the jerk"'s perspective. How would feel if other people accomplished 1/10th what you did? What if they got paid 80% of what you got paid too? What if teaching them took so much of your time that it was faster to do it yourself than hand-hold them through the process? What if, despite producing more than the rest of the team combined, management saw you as a problem, and wasn't interested in your perspective now that you had a reputation? Have you asked "the jerk" to be more polite about his feedback? Have you explained why it's important? Have you listened to his perspective?
  • jayroh 10y ago
    You work to raise your teammates up. Full stop. Productivity for a team is in aggregate - it's the entire teams productivity that's at stake, not an individual contributor's.
    • dasmoth 10y ago
      This seems to be a pretty ubiquitous view nowadays, but neglects the possibility that some projects might go better with an individual contributor just getting on with it.
      • chillacy 10y ago
        An interesting analogy is the tradeoffs in going from one machine to a distributed system: a single SQL server will outperform a 3 node cluster for small loads, but the 3 node cluster will survive hardware failures and eventually out-scale the single-node setup as you add more nodes. It feels like larger companies are always reluctant to have a single point of failure, whether it's a machine in Utah going down or Greg getting hit by a bus.
        • dasmoth 10y ago
          It's a good analogy. Setting up the three-node cluster is an awful lot more work, and if you don't do it right there's a real chance that you'll end up with lower real-world reliability than the single node. That said, I can understand why large companies worry about single points of failure. What perplexes me more is that the you-always-need-a-team mindset is filtering down to smaller and smaller organisations.
• aviraldg 10y ago
  The other side of this is worth considering: I'm no 10x developer, but I've recently been the only developer with some experience working with a team of others with none (interns.) Simple things that most with more experience would take for granted, like version control, must be explained at length to a beginner. Do this enough times and it's easy to skip explaining things, prompting such articles from them. Sometimes, before you can realise the factual superiority of a process/technique, you need to trust someone else's opinion on it. It is only later that you can understand why. This makes sense to me, because this is how I learnt when I was starting out.
• kibwen 10y ago
  For whatever reason I feel like there's an unspoken assumption in our industry that a dev is brilliant iff that dev is a jerk, which is clearly false (I'm sure everyone here has worked with devs who were brilliant at both coding and social interaction). Note how the article has to explicitly say "it is entirely possible to be extremely passionate (and even brilliant) without being a jerk", as though this were some rare intersection of talents. But brilliant non-jerks get to choose where they want to work, and they're going to prefer not to work with jerks. If you need really need a bulletproof business excuse to convince you to tell the assholes on your team to cool their jets, then do it so that you have any chance of attracting non-jerk talent.
• achikin 10y ago
  "Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated." ― George Bernard Shaw
• ianbicking 10y ago
  I don't think being a "jerk" is a personal trait, it's an environmental result. Sometimes people are very picky because they are trying to stonewall you. They come up with review comments that might be accurate, but aren't actually intended to help the change land. Maybe they review just far enough to veto, and then you fix that and they review enough to veto again. That kind of jerk is not worth much, but it's the malintent behind the impolite behavior that is the problem. Often the person is disengaged and disinterested in their job. Sometimes people are become defensive and difficult because they don't believe they are contributing enough compared to their past performance. I've seen a lot of people who did a lot of good work in the past, but aren't doing well now. Maybe processes changed, maybe how the team makes priorities changed, maybe technologies changed, maybe they aren't managing themselves well, maybe they are just depressed and having a hard time functioning. Maybe it's compounded because their own displayed confidence backed them into a wall, and they can't admit there's something they don't know or aren't able to do, and so they can't learn to do it. These jerks are "essential" (because they know stuff, maybe have authority), but not productive. Sometimes they stonewall to hide this. There's jerks who have their own agenda that doesn't align with some of the people they are supposed to work with. It a matrixed organization everyone validly has independent agendas that cross with each other. Maybe they only feel personally responsible for product quality, while they are a gatekeeper for people who are supposed to deliver new functionality. Because of how authority may be setup, someone may feel trapped between two authorities (their boss and this gatekeeper) with no way to come to agreement on priorities. Usually this is a lack of understood overarching priorities from leadership. Sometimes without that in place the only way to "win" is to be difficult. Personally I don't have a problem working with abrasive personalities so long as we truly share a goal and are working towards it. Having a group of people who really share a goal is not as common as one would hope.
• new_hackers 10y ago
  I was a jerk at my last job (btw, I'm not saying I'm brilliant either). It ended up costing me and I was shown the door. However, I was picked up by some former co-workers that knew I had some talent. Now I actively manage my "jerk" tendencies. While I still have my jerk moments, I think my co-workers realize that I'm trying not to be a jerk so they let it slide. And when I am being a jerk, they will call me out on it.
• GoToRO 10y ago
  So why he was a jerk? "Where a normal review would often contain a handful of comments and suggestions, he would regularly end up in the hundreds. Most of the comments were opinion and personal preference." So he saw more problems in the future than the rest of you and maybe your comments about his comments are opinion and personal preference. How do we know the truth? Anyway, this article is a proof that indeed B players never hire A players. Because they don't get it and they take everything personal.
• funthree 10y ago
  I don't like to defend a jerk anymore than the next person but I can play the devil's advocate here. If he's a 10x developer he's going to be a genius. A genius is a person who sees the world in shades of grays. He can't help it. If he's of that caliber then it's built into how his brain works. The comment about him being both a 10x developer and someone who sees in black and white is generally off. However, if he's looking at the work of an average person or even just an above-average person, he will ten to be able to see stronger shades of grays than other people because of his high aptitude. This is possibly why he appears to be someone who sees in black and white. Overall the author of the article borders on anti-intellectualism... which can easily veer over to anti-semitism.... the frequent opponent of Linus Torvalds.
• deleted 10y ago
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• dbg31415 10y ago
  So what is a jerk? I know this article is probably a fictitious rather than about a specific individual, but seems like if he really was a "10x"er he'd be an asset to the team and reasonably intelligent people could see that. This guy was communicating the best he could... "Where a normal review would often contain a handful of comments and suggestions, he would regularly end up in the hundreds." Sounds like he's trying. I assume it takes a lot of his time to generate comments like that... if he was right, I'd want the team to be following his advice and that should help reduce the number of comments review over review. To me... a jerk is someone in legal who says with a smile, "Sorry we were holding that information about us acquiring that other property until now... and we need the new system up and running by Monday." Or someone on the design team who just refuses to switch his designs from points to pixels or pixels to points or whatever it is the current site is using and then bitches about how it's 1/2 a pixel off in production. Or that guy in sales who tells me that the product is shit because we haven't built the one feature his important prospect really wanted... Someone who doesn't care that they are making more work for me, someone who doesn't care about the job I have to do. Someone who is doing a huge code review... with copious amounts of feedback... man, I'd love that! Sounds like he really cared and is being quite thoughtful. I think with the right manager and process the team could improve. Management layers exist to help setup processes that act as lubrication -- so if someone is just good at his job and rubbing people the wrong way... that's 100% a management problem. Having dealt with this exact problem in just about every position I've had as an adult... I think the solution is to pull aside the offended people and make sure they know how I see them -- I'd explicitly point out what I agreed with and offer praise about their production where warranted. I'd encourage them to parrot back some of the behavior towards the offending person... if they didn't feel comfortable, they could let me do it for them. I'd pull aside the "jerk" and bluntly as I could explain why it's important to be more political in dealing with others on the team. I'd make sure some personal issues weren't going on and that he knew it wasn't appropriate to be mad at people at work because his wife left him, etc. I'd make sure we did reviews every sprint (or at least every cycle) where others got to review him, and I'd read those back to him. I have literally never found a "jerk" who couldn't be reasoned with, or explained away. I had one amazing dev who was pretty far down the Asperger spectrum who loved calling people a "fucking dumbass" and eventually it just became part of the culture on that team to lovingly call everyone a "fucking dumbass" -- we even had t-shirts made. Looking past what is said to the intent... most "jerks" aren't trying to hurt feelings, they just take pride in their work. Give me people who care any day, we can find a way to work them into the team. Be careful that "morale increased steadily and we actually began to meet our goals even faster with one less person on the team" isn't just diminished expectations in disguise.
• wott 10y ago
  If I sum it up: 1. They did not manage to improve themselves a bit thanks to "the jerk"'s remarks, since the number of remarks (that he calls justified remarks) did not decrease. 2. They are now happy to deliver quickly. They don't give a fuck about the fact that they now deliver shit, and they are happy with the fact they didn't learn anything.
• js8 10y ago
  This discussion is a little bit too abstract. So I am going to take advice from Richard Feynman (who famously asked philosophers about a brick), and ask: Was Richard Feynman a jerk?
• elgenie 10y ago
  The thesis being argued here isn't supported by the poor anecdata. > Every time one of us would post our code for review, he would slaughter it. Where a normal review would often contain a handful of comments and suggestions, he would regularly end up in the hundreds. Most of the comments were opinion and personal preference. He had good reasons, and he was more often right than not, but he never even tried to be kind. He never took the opportunity to teach or mentor. He just stated his opinions as fact. > [...] At first the rest of us tried to have constructive conversations, then we often just gave in, then I realized that we were actively avoiding him altogether and skirting our process. [...] He was so good. Was it worth even arguing or talking to our manager about him? Surely if we just put up with his attitude, we’d accomplish more because of the sheer volume of his contributions. The solution here is indeed to talk to the manager. A brilliant jerk with strongly held opinions about code should be pretty easily convinced based on efficiency grounds. Repeatedly leaving hundreds of detailed review comments is not a good use of time, while writing up something that could be referred to that explains the reasons for the coding standards would prevent such comments from needing to be made in the first place (and could be used by others to distinguish stylistic preferences and opinions from truly necessary standards). Repeatedly having the same "constructive conversations" is an even worse use of time. While I'd question the "brilliance" of somebody stating "opinion as fact", someone leaving hundreds of comments in a code review clearly cares and thus can be reached by an argument grounded in the things he cares about.
• JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Lots of thoughts around the code review issue (the jerk generated 'hundreds of comment'). I have a rule: the only comments I make are about improving the correctness of the code. Nothing about technique or approach or format or cleverer ways of doing anything. Just directly actionable constructive comments.
  • hinkley 10y ago
    I try to limit myself to being no more than 50% of the comments on a review. I know what that probably sounds like, but with experience, and especially if you study ergonomics like I do, you learn that certain patterns of code that look OK are actually accidents waiting to happen. This bizarre pattern you're using has caused 3 regressions already, and we are not interested in there being a 4th. To keep it to a dull roar, I do a number of things. Be consistent, prioritize, shop my concerns, and never go first. By consistently bringing up your top concerns eventually they'll disappear from the code reviews, or others will start making the comments before you can. As things improve you can start bringing up lesser, or deeper issues. If things don't improve you start asking your peers for help communicating the importance of the issue. By going last you let other people contribute, demonstrate consensus, cover issues so you don't have to be the messenger, and you know roughly how many comments the code is going to get.
    • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Wonderful technique! Its essentially 'mentoring the crowd' by constructive participation and modeling good social behavior. I have used a technique learned early on when I was a young jerk. Instead of arguing with folks in a group, I would sit one-on-one and discuss an issue (e.g. how are we going to structure the new project). I would start with a savvy experienced team member (ok John McGinty was his name) and get a consensus between us. Then I'd go to the next team member, and say "John thinks we should do this:" and say what we had come up with. Not "I think" which is confrontational; "John thinks ...". Now they've got to put their thoughts up against his, which most folks can do without getting emotionally invested. Anyway, iterate until the team was on the same page. End result: I get my way. Or I get convinced there's a better way. Either way, I win and the team wins.
• DesiLurker 10y ago
  IMO the 10x productivity thing is a bit of straw-man. thats rarely the case. but realistically its more like 3-4x. I'd include one crucial factor in evaluating this that I always look for in new hires, its Ownership! Do you have commitment to your responsibilities or is it just about finding immediate gain (could be ego for brilliant jerks or security for mediocre lazy bum). IMO in long run if you are about avg you will converge on the 'right' solution if you are looking for it. the problem IMO is many engineers have weak sense of ownership of what they do & based on their capabilities they adjust their behavior. I'd factor in the motives behind being jerk before judging. Is it that they are just mean egotistical person whose using his technical superiority or there is genuine desire to make things better even if it means 'breaking a few eggs' in short-term?
  • watwut 10y ago
    I worked with someone like that once and it made me conclude it does not really matter whether the intention is good. If code review forces you to adjust hundreds tiny details according to someone elses preferences and opinions (as opposed to when you have something really wrong), you can not take ownership of that code. Because it is not your code in the first place. If you want people to take ownership and responsibility, you need to allow them to do so - not really possible when top dog is micromanaging them. Imo, the developer in question should have work alone on some core part of the project he would have responsibility for and not do code reviews frequently.
• ImTalking 10y ago
  Been there. Was involved in a telco software project where one person was a genius, a true unicorn. We were in meetings where some of his insight and perspective left us scratching our heads in amazement. Yet he was the most destructive co-worker I've ever come across. He never did anything. He would belittle others if they didn't grasp things. He would see a well-layout project plan and laugh and say that he could do it in a weekend, and management would listen because of his intellect and dominating presence. Every request for him to actually do any work was met with a 'too busy' answer, yet he would berate others for not meeting schedules.
  • antisthenes 10y ago
    So what's the best way for people like that to apply themselves in your view?
    • ImTalking 10y ago
      Despite his intellect, he was a child really and his only hope was for management to rein him in and focus on deliverables (which they did not).
• pipio21 10y ago
  I have created some companies and managed lots of people. In my experience, the moment I hear someone calling someone else "jerk", it tells me more about the person telling it than about the "jerk" itself. In particular it tells me you as manager can't handle this people, and you are incompetent as manager and need to improve you handling people's skills. It is something similar to Cesar Millan working with dogs, but instead of Cesar visiting dog owners that do not have a clue about the dogs they have,it is a similar process with people. I am somewhat of a "natural" managing people but also studied practical phycology for years in order to understand and manage different people and I can testify that most managers are so clueless in the practical side of things(they probably studied the things they don't apply in practice). A "no brilliant jerks" policy is the best thing you can do for your competitors that know how to handle them. Call it "Always live in your comfort zone""Do not learn" policy. Go for it. I personally love to welcome those jerks in my company and fix their traumas with clueless managers. It is also very profitable, you make money doing good and feels very satisfying at the end(after the work of fixing the traumas).
  • falsedan 10y ago
    Hey, you sound like a jerk: - stating your opinion as fact - not trying to mentor or give learning opportunities - relying on being 'right' (I'm rich and successful because I manage jerks the right way)
• mjevans 10y ago
  It's difficult to tell from one single viewpoint. However what I find MOST revealing is that there is precisely ZERO mention of 'training' anywhere in the article. Did they not attempt to train the 'jerk' to be less harsh while still effectively communicating? Did they not attempt to train the possibly overly-sensitive employees to step back and try to not take everything as a personal attack? I think that /both/ things would have enriched the value of their employees. Both those who need more guidance on being better at communicating and those who need to improve their technical skills.
• comments_db 10y ago
  Can confirm - it's true. I was one few years ago, made conscious effort to cleanse that attitude of mine. Feels so much better!
• mirekrusin 10y ago
  Funny that he complains about "jerk" seeing world as black-and-white in article that categorises people as jerks/non-jerks without any mention of in-betweeners. Also what if the "jerk" is actually right? What if he is truly surrounded by incompetent people and needs to push things himself, repeating himself all the time, his suggestions being ignored or simply not understood or completely outside of intellectual capacity of his colleagues? What if perceived progress after firing him is illusory. Created by banal steps and pseudo milestones. What if the "progress" in few years perspective will mainly mean running in circles without adding any real value, just code debt? Good manager wouldn't let go person like that, he can always jump into R&D, creating prototypes of systems/ideas alone or with somebody matching his competence.
• ender7 10y ago
  People responding about how they personally aren't bothered by jerks are missing the point. It's great if you have thick skin, but it's hard enough to hire quality engineers without having to stipulate that they must also be psychologically hardened against lazy, petty, or oblivious aggression from coworkers (i.e. jerky behavior). If I can choose to hire one brilliant jerk or three merely "good" engineers who don't need to be reminded to treat their coworkers thoughtfully, then I take the three engineers every time. Arguments pointing to famous productive jerks (e.g. Linus Torvalds) also miss the point. Sure, Linus's prickliness may actually be a benefit given his singular position, but it's just that -- singular. You'll notice that no one else in the Linux dev community gets lionized for their random acts of rage. The world can tolerate a single Linus, but the solution doesn't scale, especially not to a random work group at a tech company.
  • crpatino 10y ago
    There's room for exactly one hyper inflated ego in the Linux kernel development team. If you are not Linus, you are 25 years late.
• phaed 10y ago
  Sure I bet management goals are met in the short term, but you have to wonder at what level of quality now that they are left to their own devices. Fixing defects after release is 10-25x more costly than if found during construction (McConnel 2003 - Code Complete). How much do you want to bet that removing that brilliant dev that was finding all the issues is going to cost that project much more than they realize.
• emmelaich 10y ago
  See also this discussion in response to an article "Emotional Intelligence is overrated" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389065 and let me dupe my comment to that: Without falling on either side of the debate, it's probably a good time to bring out this quote from 1704. "Good engineers are so scarce, that one must bear with their humours" - Lord Galway, 1704
• ahallock 10y ago
  This post is full of contradictions and vagueness. > Its[sic] not that he was wrong — he rarely was > He had good reasons, and he was more often right than not > He just stated his opinions as fact. It was clear that he saw the world in black or white — no gray areas — and we were all wrong. So the author agreed that he was right almost all of the time, but he should allow for gray areas? Makes no sense. Later on: > A funny thing happened almost immediately after he left: morale increased steadily and we actually began to meet our goals even faster with one less person on the team. But the "jerk" was always right and "slaughtered" the code reviews of his peers, so what kind of code were they producing to meet their goals? Maybe this guy was a jerk and didn't work well on the team, but it also sounds like the other people involved were terrible at their jobs and should either get re-educated or find another career.
• Exofunctor 10y ago
  It's hard to be unbiased while being introspective, but I suspect I might be a bit of a jerk. I don't berate people, but I get frustrated easily with what I consider to be manifestly stupid choices. It's worth noting, then, that the most successful and productive teams I've worked on have been where everybody was a bit of a jerk. We could give each other shit without our egos getting in the way. We knew that it was just banter. It's kind of like how guy friends rib on each other all the time without it hurting their friendship; there's a certain baseline level of criticism that's enough to convey useful advice but not so much as to make people feel like shit. E.g. "Kenny, what the fuck is this loop supposed to do?" Is more effective than "I feel like this could be written more clearly."
• whack 10y ago
  Two obvious counter-examples: Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds. 10x programmer who says what he thinks, gives brutally honest feedback, doesn't couch his facts behind euphemisms or nice-guy behavior, and has extremely high standards for code quality? To many people, this description fits Linus to a T. And even if you dispute the characterization of Linus as a jerk, Steve Jobs certainly was. I don't see how anyone can hear stories about the way he treats his colleagues and employees, and not admit that he's a jerk. Did Linus and Steve cost their respective organizations/missions more than they contributed? I think a more balanced answer to the value of jerks is... it depends. Some brilliant jerks, if put in senior enough roles and given sufficient influence, can produce outstanding work-product. Outstanding enough to justify the loss of morale and attrition all around them. But if you're going to hire a jerk and expect him to be another cog in the machine, he's much more likely to gum up the works instead. Some roles require rare and outstanding talent above all else. And other roles require someone who can follow orders, work well with others, and not rock the boat too much. Whether or not you should hire a brilliant jerk, really depends on which type of role you're hiring for.
• rch 10y ago
  I worked with a brilliant jerk. He's a MD PhD w/ a 160+ IQ, sometimes yells at colleagues in meetings, and can do things nobody else can do. Wouldn't trade the experience for any I can think of.
• cthalupa 10y ago
  I don't think there's a causal relation between brilliance and jerk level, but: It's a sliding scale. Does the contribution of the jerk outweigh the loss of contribution from people offput by his attitude? Linus is a jerk, and while Linux might have been even more successful if he wasn't, that isn't who he is. Should we ignore the success of Linux just because the original creator can be an asshole at times? I'd much rather work with a brilliant nice guy than a brilliant jerk, but sometimes you don't get that choice. Sometimes your choice is a brilliant jerk who has the vision, drive, and ability to succeed at whatever your goal is, and a nice guy who doesn't.
• errantspark 10y ago
  It's less likely that there's a team of people who are abnormally sensitive to criticism than one person who is uncommonly abrasive. In this case likely the jerk's output was not worth his externalities. In general I think the externalities of having "No Jerks" tend to put a cap on an organizations success. While they can be tough to deal with they challenge the status quo. This is key if you are to avoid local maxima. In abstract a company is a hill climbing algorithm in the space of success; without noise in the system you are very likely to get stuck in a local maximum. Too much noise and you might never climb. It's not necessary to be a jerk to succeed, and it's not necessary to be a jerk to fight the status quo. I do however feel a strong correlation between these traits and being a jerk. It's all well and good to search for the right people to perfect the mix but you'll always have to settle eventually, don't be afraid to settle on someone who's a little hard to get along with if they add something else key to the mix. Simple rules are useful because they're easy to follow; but all rules have externalities. If you're following "No Jerks" to the letter I'm not sure they're are worth it.
• 69mlgsniperdad 10y ago
  The jerk referred to in this article should probably be tasked with more solo tasks. That is the solution. Not to get rid of the jerk, but to give them more freedom and distance from teammates. A person like that should also have more say in what they are working on, ideally, I think.
• snarfy 10y ago
  It sounds like you just fired Steve Jobs.
• brendangregg 10y ago
  Netflix has a "no brilliant jerks" policy in the culture deck[1], which people are encouraged to read when applying to work here. The policy works great. Just because some brilliant people are jerks doesn't mean all are. http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/35-Brilliant_Jerks_Some_companies_tolerate/35 http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664/35-Brilli...
• segmondy 10y ago
  People that lie, who are dishonest, lazy, don't wish to work hard and look out for their interest before the company's interest are the worst kind of jerks. These jerks are seriously threatened by any kind of person who is not afraid to speak up and call them out to their shenanigans. I've seen this before, where the team was building a skyscraper with cardboard boxes, and the "brilliant jerk" called them out and they fumed and morale was low. The jerk left and the team supposedly started meeting their goals and was releasing faster. Well of course they were! the lone voice that was the gatekeeper was gone and all sorts of garbage was being committed to the code base. The skyscraper went up faster, and one day it came crashing down never to go up again. I was a consultant that saw this. So I always take "jerk" with a grain of salt. Of course, people should be kind, diplomatic, and caring, but they should also tell the truth and the bitter truth. I'm conflicted on the entire training thing, I believe that senior developers should teach, however, unless the company is willing to budget time for that, it is on each person to learn and shore up their skill. The company should train their developers if they are not up to par. Work is were work happens, if you wish to learn and grow, study furiously outside of work. It's your responsibility as someone that represents themselves as a professional and asks to be paid a fair wage to learn. Some of these lessons the "senior developers" can teach are worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, I don't see junior developers cutting checks to them for those lessons. Let me reiterate, work is were work happens. If you are fortunate to find a mentor that is willing to teach you, be grateful for you are blessed. If you apply for a job and the company never talked about training you, it's your responsibility.
• johnnyhillbilly 10y ago
  So, the specifics: - The guy takes his time to offer high quality advice - The guy offers a lot of high quality advice - No real specifics are given on _why_ he's a jerk - Higher throughput is taken as a proxy for better performance without accounting for quality, NFRs etc. This piece - while interesting - doesn't give the information necessary for the reader to arrive at an independent conclusion.
• manigandham 10y ago
  There are just as many, if not more, situations where it's the rest of the team that actually can't handle the so-called "jerk" by being overly sensitive and defensive.
• phs318u 10y ago
  I wrote about a similar problem a couple of years back. I called it the "hero anti-pattern". https://mikeseablog.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/the-hero-anti-pattern/ https://mikeseablog.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/the-hero-anti-p... While I'm sure we can all come up with use-cases where the pain of a genius jerk is outweighed by the potential benefits, it's worth always remembering that realisation of those benefits is the very thing that the jerk jeopardises through his/her bad behaviour.
• d0ugie 10y ago
  "Brilliant jerk," hmm, the term I always had in mind for our CSO was a brilliant sadistic sociopath. I couldn't help but admire him, but man, he loved to ruin my weekends.
• solatic 10y ago
  Articles like this one are counterproductive for not trying to understand the root core of the "jerk" behavior. There's no such thing as a team where everyone on the team is on the same level - there's always some distribution, this guy has decades of experience and is brilliant, this guy is a junior straight out of college. To every brilliant person on a team (and every team has someone who is relatively brilliant, again because it's a distribution), the people at the other end of the distribution are dead weight. The question is about the personality types of the people on the team and the way that management decides to deal with them. If management doesn't put the brilliant people into more senior roles, where they are directed to mentor lower-performing people to try and bring the entire team up to a higher performing level, then management is backing the status quo. This breeds frustration and resentment on the part of the high performers. If management does get the high performers to mentor the low performers, but low performers fail to show improvement, it's management's responsibility to ask why? Does management need to help guide the high performer to help him become a better mentor? Or is the low performer a low performer not because he's inexperienced but because he has no drive for self-improvement? If the low performer remains a low performer over time, why is management keeping him on the team? Too much management philosophy is falsely dedicated to "feel-good" practice. If your team feels good, then they will be motivated to work for you, and will work at their maximum potential for productivity, and succeed. Team happiness is, of course, important, but so many happy teams fail because happiness is not a cure for mediocrity, and their mediocre products are outcompeted by better options on the market. What management really needs to ask is whether brilliant jerks are jerks because they enjoy belittling others, or are they jerks because they're frustrated at the team's mediocrity and genuinely desire for the team to write better code? If it's the former, then yeah, get rid of them, they're toxic. But most of the time it's the latter, and their the blame for their frustration lies not with the 10x programmer, but with the manager, for trying to inculcate happy teams instead of productive and effective teams.
• peter_retief 10y ago
  Opinionated people can often be jerks, they don't work well in teams, but that quality might be what makes them exceptional. Maybe let them work the night shift :)
• stillsut 10y ago
  There are two types of "jerk but productive" and what separates them is whether they are willing, even on the lookout, for things to learn from their more junior colleagues. Example: Un-curious jerk: please don't write anything, even developer tools, for this company is node.js; I heard it's still riddled with bugs and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Curious jerk: we can't build any official tooling with this stack yet, but for a couple minutes could you show me how you were taking advantage of the asynchronous capabilities, I heard it has killer support there?
• Mikho 10y ago
  When the whole team feels uncomfortable as a result of one person behaviour, it's time to get rid of this bad apple—total output will be bigger than one person being brilliant and the whole team unproductive. For 10 years I had outsourcing studio and once one of my programmers was that bad apple. At first he was nice, but then in couple months showed his real character. After four months of pain for everybody I fired him. Never again would I tolerate such situation.