Computer Science Personality Disorder?

I’ve witnessed a room full of half as smart people trying to get a project done many times. They’ll take 10 months setting meetings and talking in circles, because no one knows enough to actually get started.

Generally, there needs to be at least one lone wolf (or someone who wishes they were a lone wolf) who reads the manual and starts building the thing. At least then everyone else has something to talk about and the discussions can start to have some real direction to helping shape what comes next after the base is laid down.

While it’s great if this person has people skills, it isn’t always the case. Either way, the person is needed. I think somewhere around 1 in 5 people on a team need to have some of that in them. They make the seismic changes, and the others are around to support and maintain.

Problems arise when the person in question can’t back up their big talk with getting things done, and their personality isn’t just a quirk worth dealing with, but an obstacle that drags the whole team down. I’ve experienced this as well and it wasn’t fun.

I would agree - especially developers are prone to develop this "better than you" attitude. The detail-oriented job of a developer and the need for exactness and correctness of the code leads to a high transparency of the quality of someone's work and facilitates comparisons on a peer level. I have the feeling, developers treat their work as some kind of puzzle and look to see who can solve this puzzle quicker and better - a very competitive environment with clear rights and wrongs. If you have an edge, you can abuse this situation.

> Is this everyone else's experience?

Yeah, and not only in the academic environment. Corporate environments have their flavour of this bs as well: people that get an ounce of career development and now all of a sudden their opinion casually always align with the upper management's directives.

I don't think it's academic-specific, even though the academic environment is particularly bad as people get tenure in there and are basically impossible to remove, and a lot of people have to go through them during their university years.

Maybe we as a society can work on re-aligning the incentives? Like celebrating people who collaborate more than we celebrate assholish people? Doesn't seem like it's working, though (just look at the whole social media scene, twitter/x in particular).

I don't have a solution, just wanted to acknowledge the problem.

Sure. You need to know how to handle those types; you'll never be rid of them. Broadly, though, I think any large ecosystem needs a broad mix of personality types, including the ones stereotypically painted as 'negative', to remain vibrant. If everyone in a community were high in agreeableness, say, this will feel nice to the people in it, but could have downsides if no-one feels able to engage in conflict, disagreement or argue for controversial ideas.

We don't need to celebrate or encourage any asshole-like behavior of the stereotypical "genius asshole" but, regardless, enough such people have achieved things that, potentially, an agreeable genius could have not. (The same is true vice versa, of course, we need as many highly agreeable people too!)

B players with too much ego are the kinds who put PhD on their card/throw titles around, talk about MENSA, and challenge everyone else to trivia contests. At a big name, exclusive department, more than half of the people were normal and well-adjusted, while the other half skewed on a continuum of quirky to mildly obnoxious or ego now and then but not completely intolerable. TED speakers and people with giant awards, prizes, and h-index. The worst types are the completely intolerable folks who are overconfident and treat others badly because of a superiority complex... the "big fish, tiny pond"-"Comic Book Guy" lifers are found in megacorps.

Another aspect to keep in mind is the ambiguity and conflation between a continuum of intentional (jerk) to unintentional (dork) lack of honest and accurate looking-glass self.

Finally, another anti-pattern of some subject matter experts is being too comfortable within a narrow range of subjects, talents, life experiences, etc. and being generally excessively risk adverse.

The best thing one can do is broaden their horizons by finding where the artists, (sane) homeless people, OG's, and otherwise interesting and genuinely awesome people hang out. Makerspaces, hidden cafe or bar, or so on. I met way more interesting quasi-homeless people in Palo Alto than former Apple employee #4 jerk friend-of-a-friend swinging their Lambo keys around. Ego is boring, status is boring, and absurd wealth is boring too.