Engineers Who Are Jerks

I feel like I have 2 personalities at work: 1. Serious personality. I want to be relentless in achieving the best possible solution within our constraints. Good enough, isn't good enough when we can do better with the same resources and time. In meetings, I'll push people, argue and present data that's contrary to the proposal. At the same time, once we make a decision, we move on and don't revisit old decisions unless something happens that fundamentally changes our assumptions. My mental model is that these professional interactions should be devoid of any personal biases and even heated discussions shouldn't be taken personally.

2. Leisure personality. When I'm not talking about work, chatting about restaurants, vacations, etc. I'm more interested in learning about my co-workers. What they like doing in their free time, etc.

I tend to not let the 2 mix in the same interaction. Recently, I've gotten this feeling that people may have a hard time distinguishing these 2, especially in a remote first world. Generally in a non-remote world, there are enough small conversations before / after meetings that people realize that my serious side, isn't my only side. I care about you as an individual, but we still have professional pride.

Uff, I might have been that guy! I think it came about from my first couple of tech jobs in which I was either working alone or was the most knowledgeable one on the team and thus pretty much anything I said happen. When I came to work with teams I’d “care too much” as in I’d want functions to be called in a certain way, or logic to be split is X or Y way, or some other random thing to be implemented in a specific way.

Not only was that, I’m sure, very annoying to my coworkers but it also brought be a lot of anxiety. I had this stupid idea that “I knew” and others only “knew” as long as they agreed with my knowledge.

I’ve come to realize that that is quite stupid and a huge source of stress that I could just cut away!

As a policy nowadays I accept pretty much any opinions or changes to my PR as long as is not something that actually affect the product. I remember once having elevating a disagreement all the way to the CTO about a variable name! so, no, a coworker things that X should be called Y? For sure! That we should use .forEach instead of a for loop? No problem! I don’t own that code, we as a team do, and thus I no longer “care”. Don’t get me wrong, I still have opinions and share those as needed, but I’ve come to realize that there are many ways to accomplish the same thing, that “elegance” is not really a value that business holds in high regard (business == $$), and that getting stuff done and getting along makes me as an engineer very valuable to the company.

I nitpick on my personal projects, I write “elegant” (at least my definition of it) code for my editor config file, and I’m way happier that way!

I have met very competent people that are a bit arrogant, and personally (while I recognize it is not ideal) I think I can deal with that. What I find more difficult is to deal with incompetent people who, on top of it, are arrogant.

If you are going to be arrogant you better be sure you are indeed a rock star :) Not that I recommend it.