Fierce Nerds

>Then I joined companies and it feels like a ton of my time is wasted by processes, norms and ideologies.

I work in biotech and I smiled when I read this. The entirety of our business relies on people following processes, norms and ideologies. Once the "thinking" stage is done - the rules and framework are now in-place. You need to trust them and follow through to produce results for the company.

In tech so many nerds are constantly sharpening their tools or creating new ones and chasing some mythical 'perfection' that they lose sight of the results - the thing that matters the most to the company. Being entirely result oriented has changed my outlook completely, and made me a happier person. I am much more respectful towards people who produce actual results using any tools rather than judging someone who uses Java or Perl or whatever other language/tool that is not the flavor of the month. And working in biotech has made me value long term reliability over everything else. The single most thing that is important to me is that the tool be reliable and ready for me to use to produce results.

Do you think he's defending himself, or the entrepreneurs he funds, befriends and admires?

1.3 million employees a recent news article said. wow.

I worked with a number of brilliant people at Bell Labs through the 1980s/1990s. The most comfortably competent among them, the most productive among them, were also the least abrasive. They were also the most self deprecating.

Not just one or two, but the majority of them. To the point that the aggressive geniuses stood out. And I worked for/with two abrasive ones as well, so I know the difference.

The same was true for the two startups I worked at after that, and Qualcomm, and now the third startup where I work.

The really productive geniuses in each situation were easy to work with, I think largely, because of their confidence in their own grasp of the subject at hand. They had nothing to prove, they knew that, and it showed. The difficult people were never stupid, far from it, but they felt like they needed to defend everything they did, every decision they made, and that made working with them less productive.

With the gentle geniuses, if you thought you came up with something that was an improvement on what was being done, they would look at it honestly, and if it was not better, they would calmly explain why, and if it was better, they would acknowledge it right out and discuss how to merge that into the current work.

The 'less gentle' ones would take pride in pointing out the flaws in your idea if you were wrong, and if you were right, would fight you over whether it had any real value at all, then would stiff arm you as far as getting it accepted as a change.

My favourite people to work with are the gentle geniuses. I love to be wrong around them because I get to learn, and I love opportunities to present something useful I've done and know it will become a valuable contribution.

I avoid the other kind of person like a plague now. They ruin otherwise excellent teams. They might be fine to have a drink with or something, but in day to day work, they are sand paper.

Another thing I find is that the gentle variety tend to understand and appreciate realistic timelines. Highly competitive "nerds" tend to fight on timelines, or suppress others using them. Why wasn't that done sooner? Wait, all you did in 3 days was this? It's a terrible tool used to knock team mates down a peg on a routine basis.