121–130 of 279 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd rather take neither of them and.. I 'd rather drive a Ferarri.
Are brilliant & nice people really as rare as y'all seem to be suggesting? That's not my experience at all.
The only "10x" developer I have worked with taught me not only a ton about agile teams, but also about the liberal use of interpersonal skills in advancement of that goal. We routinely worked with education administrators (former teachers) who all had classroom experience and professional interpersonal skills training. It was amazing to work with people you could simply expect respect from, even when everyone was wel…
Was Richard Feynman a jerk?
> Every time one of us would post our code for review, he would slaughter it. 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. He had good reasons, and he was more often right than not, but he never even tried to be kind. He never took the opportunity to teach or mentor. He just stated his opinions as fact.
> [...] At first the rest of us tried to have constructive conversations, then we often just gave in, then I realized that we were actively avoiding him altogether and skirting our process. [...] He was so good. Was it worth even arguing or talking to our manager about him? Surely if we just put up with his attitude, we’d accomplish more because of the sheer volume of his contributions.
The solution here is indeed to talk to the manager. A brilliant jerk with strongly held opinions about code should be pretty easily convinced based on efficiency grounds. Repeatedly leaving hundreds of detailed review comments is not a good use of time, while writing up something that could be referred to that explains the reasons for the coding standards would prevent such comments from needing to be made in the first place (and could be used by others to distinguish stylistic preferences and opinions from truly necessary standards). Repeatedly having the same "constructive conversations" is an even worse use of time.
While I'd question the "brilliance" of somebody stating "opinion as fact", someone leaving hundreds of comments in a code review clearly cares and thus can be reached by an argument grounded in the things he cares about.
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> In my experience, talented developers are usually intelligent enough that they can make up for their shortcoming in the social area by consciously adapting their behaviour. That's orthogonal to the issue mentioned in the article. For the purposes of "not being a jerk", it doesn't matter if that comes naturally or if you have to devote conscious effort to it; only the resulting behavior matters. > Brilliant jerks ar…
Having worked at a company with very nice people and no fire to actually get things done (just platitudes), it can be just as bad of an environment if your goal is to succeed. Often times people come in to "play work" and achieve only a fraction of what's possible.
It's also a question of circumstance. Right now, for example, I'm working to mitigate, and eventually to resolve, a morale crisis on my team, which exists for good and cogent reasons that don't merit discussion here. Now is not the time for fire - and fire alone in any case works only when the vision is so powerful that smart, capable people will tolerate being driven painfully hard to achieve it. Without offering something to make that worthwhile, fire can't drive them onward - it can only drive them away.
I have never had a good job. Most of my life has been miserable working in QA and not finding any value in anything I do or being able to find something better. This currently leads me to where I am today, working at a huge corp in a pool of mediocrity. The people around me have absolutely no big ambitions to do anything meaningful in life and are very comfortable with their mediocre kids. These people are happy whic…
> 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…
Maybe I'm the exception, but I have worked with someone as bad as the article described. He would re-write everyones code when they weren't around, because he didn't consider it good enough, so they were completely de-moralized. Eventually he was assigned solo projects, which became overly complex and were never finished, until he left the company. Management should have noticed earlier how unproductive he was to hav…
And of course when you assign them to solo projects they fail. Because they're not very good at software development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my experience, talented developers are usually intelligent enough that they can make up for their shortcoming in the social area by consciously adapting their behaviour. That's orthogonal to the issue mentioned in the article. For the purposes of "not being a jerk", it doesn't matter if that comes naturally or if you have to devote conscious effort to it; only the resulting behavior matters. > Brilliant jerks ar…
> Survivorship bias. In more ways than one. When jerks are allowed to be jerks, people who do not want to deal with jerks leave the company. So the jerks bubble up to the top, while otherwise great engineers who don't want to be berated move along to better things.
If you encounter many skilled jerks, consider why that might be, and why in the same environment you don't also encounter skilled people who are fun to work with. In such an environment, the skilled people who are fun to work with can afford to leave, while some of the non-skilled people may not have that option. So, it's natural that within such an environment (company, project, etc), it'll look like a correlation between jerkiness and skill. People then start assuming a causation, and thus contribute to that same cycle.
The opposite environment, with many skilled people who are fun to work with, will tend to reject jerks regardless of skill. I've also noticed that such an environment tends to have a much higher degree of mentorship and collaboration, in addition to being more fun to work in, and boosting energy rather than draining it.
See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZSli7QW4rg and http://www.slideshare.net/dberkholz/assholes-are-killing-you... .
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped reading when the blogger started talking about the "brilliant developer who could code circles around us", and then referred to him as a "10x developer". These are stereotypes, and quite often bloggers will make up stories to illustrate a point. Which is fine, but when your point is based upon stereotypes, then I'm not interested. ---- So with that said, I agree with everything you've said. Quite often thes…
Or there was an abrasive jerk who made them to do the wrong thing. Abrasive jerk was likely to be the one doing then shouting down. Abrasiveness does not make you right, the assumption that the most pushy jerk is right is just wrong.
We should be putting "abrasive jerk" in quotes. The point that was being made by both of us is that these abrasive jerks aren't actually abrasive jerks, they're just going against the grain because it's the technically better choice.
And then they get labelled as abrasive jerks and ignored, and then queue the scandal when people talk about how horrible the toyota code is (for example).