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Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

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Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#101

Post by xiaoma »

astrodust wrote: post #58
xiaoma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Elison and Jeff Bezos each nurtured that sort of person (and were themselves that sort of person). They utterly steamrolled the kinder and gentler companies in their respective markets. Sometimes reality and what you want to be true are not the same.

Their personalities could not be more different. Their approach to business and life are completely orthogonal.

And yet all ran cultures where jerks thrived in engineering (or sales in Oracle's case).

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#102

Post by GoToRO »

So why he was a jerk? "Where a normal review would often contain a handful of comments and suggestions, he would regularly end up in the hundreds. Most of the comments were opinion and personal preference."

So he saw more problems in the future than the rest of you and maybe your comments about his comments are opinion and personal preference. How do we know the truth?

Anyway, this article is a proof that indeed B players never hire A players. Because they don't get it and they take everything personal.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#103

Post by hermitdev »

andreyz4k wrote: post #31
Waterluvian wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey that's me! I had a frustrating moment the other day where a colleague said that float(5) was more explicit and personally preferred in Python than a literal 5.0 I realised I was being pedantic but I genuinely believed in "good craftsmanship" when I really pushed him to change it. I need to get better at this because the social friction I caused may cost more than the poor craftsmanship. But the other part of me i…

By the way, float(5) is slower, because it creates two objects instead of one.

One of my pet peeves in C++ is seeing: std::string s = "";

It causes calls to strlen and potentially memory allocations. Just use the default constructor!

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#104

Post by funthree »

I don't like to defend a jerk anymore than the next person but I can play the devil's advocate here.

If he's a 10x developer he's going to be a genius. A genius is a person who sees the world in shades of grays. He can't help it. If he's of that caliber then it's built into how his brain works. The comment about him being both a 10x developer and someone who sees in black and white is generally off. However, if he's looking at the work of an average person or even just an above-average person, he will ten to be able to see stronger shades of grays than other people because of his high aptitude. This is possibly why he appears to be someone who sees in black and white.

Overall the author of the article borders on anti-intellectualism... which can easily veer over to anti-semitism.... the frequent opponent of Linus Torvalds.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#105

Post by ktRolster »

amorphid wrote: post #77
beachy wrote: post #13

> A “No Jerks” Policy Must Be Built Into Your Culture. It is entirely possible to be extremely passionate (and even brilliant) without being a jerk. A “no jerks” policy must be preached and practiced from the highest levels. Following simplistic rules like this is usually what leaves us knee deep in the proverbial. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never worked with anyone who's as much of a jerk as described in the ar…

I tell myself I can work with (almost) anyone who is trying to do better. If someone is intentionally being subversive, that's hard to work with. Humans are difficult, and the people that own that & try anyway are my kind of people.

If someone is intentionally being subversive, that's hard to work with.

Yeah, that's true. I'd rather work with an honest jerk than a friendly back-stabber.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#106

Post by FLUX-YOU »

curun1r wrote: post #83

I've met two kinds of "brilliant jerks" in my working life. One is insufferable and makes the lives of his (it's usually a he) co-workers such a nightmare that they end up quitting. The other is abrasive but pushes his co-workers to achieve a higher level. I've even worked with one developer who was both and, while I hated every moment of working with him, I'm undoubtedly better at what I do now for having worked wit…

>One is insufferable and makes the lives of his (it's usually a he) co-workers such a nightmare that they end up quitting. The other is abrasive but pushes his co-workers to achieve a higher level.

See, the first guy is just a Junior Brilliant Jerk. He's slowly learning and will eventually turn into the Senior Brilliant Jerk if you give him enough time. The Senior Brilliant Jerk is the one that stays just within people's tolerances. But you can't become a Senior without being a Junior first, so sorry, you were just the one to give him some experience. :)

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#107

Post by maineldc »

Waterluvian wrote: post #24
beachy wrote: post #13

> A “No Jerks” Policy Must Be Built Into Your Culture. It is entirely possible to be extremely passionate (and even brilliant) without being a jerk. A “no jerks” policy must be preached and practiced from the highest levels. Following simplistic rules like this is usually what leaves us knee deep in the proverbial. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never worked with anyone who's as much of a jerk as described in the ar…

Hey that's me! I had a frustrating moment the other day where a colleague said that float(5) was more explicit and personally preferred in Python than a literal 5.0 I realised I was being pedantic but I genuinely believed in "good craftsmanship" when I really pushed him to change it. I need to get better at this because the social friction I caused may cost more than the poor craftsmanship. But the other part of me i…

I have found that it's best to leave coding discussions like that to tools - we use Rubocop and Overcommit and it's a huge PITA every time it points out a minor quibble (we stop commits locally on our machines if new code doesn't pass both) BUT it saves us from having those conversations during code reviews. My general rule of thumb is that if there is a question of style that isn't caught by Rubocop, then it's very likely not worth having.

The other upside is that code reviews are higher quality and design focused.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#108

Post by jayroh »

zug_zug wrote: post #84

Well, let's look at it from the "the jerk"'s perspective. How would feel if other people accomplished 1/10th what you did? What if they got paid 80% of what you got paid too? What if teaching them took so much of your time that it was faster to do it yourself than hand-hold them through the process? What if, despite producing more than the rest of the team combined, management saw you as a problem, and wasn't interes…

You work to raise your teammates up. Full stop. Productivity for a team is in aggregate - it's the entire teams productivity that's at stake, not an individual contributor's.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#109

Post by ktRolster »

Waterluvian wrote: post #24
beachy wrote: post #13

> A “No Jerks” Policy Must Be Built Into Your Culture. It is entirely possible to be extremely passionate (and even brilliant) without being a jerk. A “no jerks” policy must be preached and practiced from the highest levels. Following simplistic rules like this is usually what leaves us knee deep in the proverbial. Maybe I've been lucky, but I've never worked with anyone who's as much of a jerk as described in the ar…

Hey that's me! I had a frustrating moment the other day where a colleague said that float(5) was more explicit and personally preferred in Python than a literal 5.0 I realised I was being pedantic but I genuinely believed in "good craftsmanship" when I really pushed him to change it. I need to get better at this because the social friction I caused may cost more than the poor craftsmanship. But the other part of me i…

I'll be honest, it's pretty hard to see how it matters much either way.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#110

Post by 65827 »

EpicEng wrote: post #96
omni wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll take the brilliant jerk [over the mediocre nice guy] any day. Holy false dichotomy, Batman. I'd rather take neither of them and fill my team with adequate-to-exceptional devs who also happen to be decent human beings.

I didn't say there's no middle ground. Of course I'd prefer the brilliant nice guy, but you don't always have that option. I disagree on 'adequate' though. I'll take a truly brilliant a-hole over 'adequate'. 'Adequate' means I'm often fixing their mistakes, checking up on them, making sure they stay on track, etc. I'm ok with smoothing over issues from time to time if it means I can let them run wild on the thing I h…

Well I'd prefer strawberry ice cream, as long as we're talking options here!
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