When Smart People are Bad Employees

Is the layout of this site borked for any other Chrome users?

Looks fine in Firefox, but the layout (sidebar & header) are gone in (my) Chrome OS X. Want to be sure it's not a script-blocking or ad-blocking plugin doing it (I think I disabled them all).

"The Heretic: Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons."

Statistically speaking, the employee is probably right. But at most companies, building a case for this is an exercise in tautology. Maybe take him seriously and at least make it look like you are being proactive about his issues.

"The Flake: ... he completed the project in 72 hours." He did two weeks of coding in 3 days. If he doesn't show up for the next two weeks, and the product had no major flaws, who cares?

Drug addiction and mental disorder are a separate issue, in my opinion. If he is really as good as it seemed, it would have behooved the employer to get him into rehab/psychological treatment.

"The Jerk: ...sounds like House M.D." WHY did you put someone with no people skills in a management position? (Senior management to boot). It makes very little sense. Someone who is a jerk isn't going to be good at managing people. A jerk could be a great individual contributor, as long as the jerk does his work correctly.

I feel like it is more about making the right concessions given the individual, and making sure you don't put people into positions where their faults are amplified.

An analogy to this post would be finding that a puzzle piece doesn't go where you want to put it, and therefore declaring that it is a bad puzzle piece (even though it fits somewhere else just fine).

I once had an employer who seemed (to me) to prefer people who were (in my opinion) pretty inappropriate for their jobs because they had so little ability to do them. I found it very difficult to understand at the time, because I generally like to have people around who are better than me at most things, so I can concentrate on what I do best.

It was interesting over the years, though, to see what happened. That particular employer was a great believer that anyone can learn anything, and she was incredibly patient with some people who really were not gifted at all in their area of work.

Above all she valued loyalty (and in key areas, such as finance, she preferred absolute stupidity). I learned a lot from her. I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed, whereas the slower, more loyal people were still there getting the job done. I also learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance. I saw that she liked stupid people in sensitive areas because then they couldn't mess up in any serious way. They made lots of small mistakes but they didn't have the ability to make big mistakes and they always asked whenever they didn't understand what they were doing.

Personally I think there is a balance here. I would find it hard to go as far as she did, but it certainly caused me to look at people decisions in a different way, which I would never have come up with if I hadn't seen her in action.

This is very true. I've seen it at all levels of BigCo.

Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works (unfortunately).

The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo-

- I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely.

I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.