The Brotherhood of Morons

I've been on the receiving end of this before. The problem is there are a lot of folks out there with tremendous subject matter intelligence, and often times they are pushed into management. A good amount of these folks don't really have the skills to deal with people as people, not as subordinates. They "teach" to the best of their ability, but this, sometimes, comes up short, and their way of dealing with the people they can't "teach" often involves making a tough decision. They don't think their way of doing things is dick-ish, and in my case, the person wasn't intentionally trying to be a dick, he just happened to act in a manner that made everyone think he was.

Human relationship dynamics are tricky, and doubly tricky in the working world. Everyone is different, and this can make things outright impossible when it comes to setting expectations and managing people in a uniform or case-by-case way.

Thankfully, I don't manage people for a living.

I grew up surrounded by Ivy leaguers. You could tell who came from money, and who made it on their own merit. Some of the wealthiest people I've ever met growing up were lower/middle class kids with tremendous academic intelligence AND street-smarts who made it to the ivies on their own merit and excelled from there. Some of the dumbest of that Ivy cohort were kids of exorbitantly wealthy, and due to their social class and connections, were pretty much promised a spot at one of the top schools. They aren't dumb in the sense that they are truly brainless...quite the opposite - they were good academically and often quite book-smart, but lacked every real-world marker of human intelligence; and would be the last person you'd want to hire or work with.

Harvard, Penn, Yale, etc... are places where the smart poor or smart middle class go to rub elbows with (and get jobs working for the parents of) wealthy idiots.

> I'll be making some moves to rectify this, even if it means having to spend more energy working elsewhere - the risk of a fool destroying our department's budget and putting me out of a job is too high

So they will be moving away from their department to some other one. Based on their other blog posts, I am sure they will say it all diplomatically and without burning any bridges, with some made-up reason about passion or self-improvement or company vision.

This seems to be better for everyone - author will be happier, department they left might be happier too.

(Trying to level-up everyone is a noble goal, but is a very hard work. Trying to level-up someone who does not want or can not level up, all while you have your own tasks to do, is even worse and can be extremely demotivating. I don't blame author on changing department instead.)

I've seen this once in my career: one of the project directors claiming the certain project is fine in the face of opposite evidence, doing nothing while it went further and further off-track, until the customers (who have seen the status reports) asked for a deliverable and everything just collapsed. This was very amusing to see from the distance, but if I really cared about the project I would be very disheartened.

(But I would not call this director "moron" - they got their 7-figure salary for few years, and while they did lose their position, I am sure they will eventually find a new project to lead)

Re 2nd part of your message: 100% agree, never judge people by a single event, everyone has a bad day sometimes. However if that's your team-mate and you have a few month worth of experience working with them...