At one of my previous employers, we had one such jerk who was so bad that even his manager quit in frustration. None of the other managers wanted to take him in their team. This guy was technically bright but very hard to get along with. He would intimidate everything into getting his way. At one point, none of the engineers wanted to work with him. Management did warn him but it didn't make a difference. So the company found a new manager and put this guy under that poor soul. Eventually things were suddenly resolved when this jerk verbally harassed a key technical lead who was ready to quit if that guy was still around. If you look at this resume, he has a patchy work history of short stints. But his is good technically so companies are lured by him.
Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
111–120 of 243 posts
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#112Google has an interesting philosophy on this: """ Cosgrove asked them to elaborate on the idea: "exile the knaves, but fight for the divas." Rosenberg said maintaining Google's collaborative culture requires weeding out and getting rid of the knaves: Employees who lack integrity, who are jealous of their peers, take credit for others' work, and think only of themselves. "Nice humble engineers have a way of becoming i…
By all accounts I've heard from friends working at Google X, Sergey Brin is the textbook definition of a "brilliant jerk". This probably has something to do with it.
Facebook has open floor plans not because they are effective at collaboration or productive work environments, but because Mark Zuckerberg prefers being able to see everyone at work.
Companies tend to be modeled around the strengths and weaknesses of their founders.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#113Jerk is often just a paraphrase for "mildly autistic."
I've had really good results hiring "jerks" and actually taking the time to understand them as people, and then put them into positions to succeed.
Calling out others as jerks is very often a power play to gain social leverage over people who aren't good at that game.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#114I found the line of questioning and discussion by the manager of the employee he "told off" to be profound, yet succinct: > 1. Was it my intent to make his staff unproductive? > 2. Do you think you could have told my engineer what you needed to, in a way that left them feeling positive and motivated to fix it? > Always do that in the future, please.
In my case, for most my teenage and short adult life I was always left "feeling positive and motivated" except I would always fall back into the same habits. I started to expect the gentleness and kindness. What I needed was a good ass whooping. If I look back at my life in hindsight, I learned the most when I was under the gun -- had to succeed, failure not an option -- not "motivated" and "positively influenced" Ma…
How are you defining 'motivated'? To me it seems like an oxymoron to be motivated and not do anything.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#115I am an Alice and I need some feedback as why is it a bad thing! I work in an environment when very small percentage of people know what are they doing. and people that know what is going on do not speak up because they are frustrated and know probably nothing will change. in this environment I do speak up whenever I get a chance and I've been in arguments with managers 3 4 level above me. everybody else wants to be…
> PS: where I currently work is wasting public money and I feel obligated to do something as a Libertarian! do non-libertarians feel that there's nothing wrong with companies wasting taxpayer money?
I often wonder that myself.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is certainly a problem I’ve seen. One employee was hated by almost all the technical people because he was a jackass and couldn’t work with others. He wanted everything done his way and wasn’t interested in the opinions of others (except as they may bolster how great his ideas were). The truth is he wasn’t very good, at least not to the degree he tried to present. Some of management loved him because he worked s…
Well what happened at the end?
Eventually I threaten to quit because of him. The guy who was hired as his replacement had apparently made a similar threat after it was clear he wasn’t going to get the job he signed on for. And an incident meant others in management got a small view into just how little he actually accomplished.
It helped the company wasn’t doing great and cutting his salary was probably useful.
Years too late though. We’d lost good people because of him. I was only there because I could minimize my interactions with him (through role and power) so I didn’t have to deal with him much.
OH. The other thing was he got shuffled to a different manager who very quickly learned what he was dealing with and didn’t want to waste his time with it.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#117This is one of the great examples of survivorship bias. You start to think that all of the most brilliant people are jerks, but the reality is that all of the non-brilliant jerks were fired long ago for crossing the line. The only ones left are very very valuable -- and still should fired if they can't play nice.
... which is how you end up in a company with mediocre engineers, developing mediocre products, sliding into mediocre abyss.
But at least while making those mediocre salaries they can all hate those "brilliant jerks" that they fired.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is certainly a problem I’ve seen. One employee was hated by almost all the technical people because he was a jackass and couldn’t work with others. He wanted everything done his way and wasn’t interested in the opinions of others (except as they may bolster how great his ideas were). The truth is he wasn’t very good, at least not to the degree he tried to present. Some of management loved him because he worked s…
95% of the time I've seen this toxic behavior it's been from a manager, and their behavior was tacitly encouraged by their superiors.
Oh the manager was definitely a huge part. The manager thought he was a great worker and maybe just needed closer watching (he could do good work if watched like a hawk, was a mess left on his own) but that never lasted long.
Lots of excuses, ‘one more time’s, ‘not right now’, ‘on his final chance’, ‘we are looking for a replacement’, etc.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#119Early on in my career (DevOps/Virtualization/SDN/etc) I landed a role as a junior admin, a backfill for a more senior engineer who was moving up in the organization, but staying on the same team. It could be said he landed somewhere between "Alice" and "Bob", probably due to some mild autism. Without getting into excessive detail, working with him was hard, but by far the most rewarding, educational, and instructive…
I could work with such people when I was younger, relatively low confidence and inexperienced. It is when i learned nore and had enough experience to have own opinions and gained confidense when being expected to do constant "yes sir" no matter how much I disagreed bothered me way more.
Most of those people are much less briliant when you are not a junior. It is mostly that they are rewarded for being jerk.
Re: Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
#120I'd add that from an engineering perspective, 'brilliant' jerks aren't even that brilliant. An actually intelligent person is happy to prove his thinking via truthful argumentation (and unit tests, documentation, and so on), and also happy to get his points refuted by similarly reasonable peers. Anything other than that approach is noise.
Imagine that every time you implemented a new feature in your existing Java codebase, everyone asked you to explain Java. Would you be happy to prove the value of Java to your colleagues constantly? Would you start thinking that your peers maybe weren't similarly reasonable to you? At what point does explaining things become frustrating to you?
I think you should reword your question as it's not a realistic scenario.
Engineers freely choose to learn Java and apply to Java job postings, and if that's not the case I doubt they'd be vocal against the "value" of Java.