221–230 of 279 posts
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Steve Jobs has been a well known jerk. It helped apple to have him.
Please don't. Our industry is already full enough of assholes who saw part of the Steve Jobs movie and started to think that management is all about berating or "negging" people so they do what you want.
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…
This piece - while interesting - doesn't give the information necessary for the reader to arrive at an independent conclusion.
No they don't; mediocre 'nice guys' do though. Every 'brilliant jerk' I've worked with and led has been a net positive over the long haul. Every mediocre nice guy has been dead weight that costs everyone around them time. I'll take the brilliant jerk any day. They can simply deliver in ways that others cannot.
Not a chance. Brilliant jerks are a cancer on the team and business, and they very rarely deliver.
Says who? This has never been my experience. They are tolerated specifically because they deliver. If they're not delivering then why are they still around?
No they don't; mediocre 'nice guys' do though. Every 'brilliant jerk' I've worked with and led has been a net positive over the long haul. Every mediocre nice guy has been dead weight that costs everyone around them time. I'll take the brilliant jerk any day. They can simply deliver in ways that others cannot.
If your head count is 5 or less, one brillian jerk (BJ) can carry the team on his shoulders. If BJ's a 10x programmer, and the other option is to hire a brillian and nice (BN) who's merelly an 8x programmer, you are better off with the BJ as tech lead. Assume your core team was 5x, 4x and 2x before the hiring of the tech lead. The 4x and 2x guys will probably slow down BN to 6x, so you end up with 17x of team through…
I guess not, at least, within the context of your little story.
To be fair, I am thinking of small teams, and I can imagine how their value would decline in larger outfits.
That said, I don't hire people to write CRUD apps either. Truly brilliant people should be working on solving hard problems which lack a general solution, not data layers and library duct tape.
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Most people can see through "I strongly disagree for the following reasons..." as a euphemism for "your idea is stupid, and this is why..." And the more you emphasize "strongly" in the former, the more likely "fucking" materializes between "is" and "stupid" in the latter. That kind of bland vocabulary makes one's statements sound like limp static. Corporate dialect is contrived to remove strong (corporate-environment…
In this cases, shouldn't the discussion be purely about the technical merits of the idea, rather than emotions of the people speaking about it? I would count removing unneeded emotions from the conversation as a positive thing.
Emotion is a very powerful signal during discussion. It's a counterpoint to logic; they work together. Rarely does logic by itself win anyone over. Trying to remove "unneeded" (who decides what an unneeded emotion is) emotion is folly. We're not Vulcans.
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Unless you can prove that one method is significantly faster or the other structurally dangerous, it is just a matter of coding style and opinion. Agree to disagree, or let the lint tool be the referee.
$ python -m timeit 'float(5)' 10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0776 usec per loop $ python -m timeit '5.0' 100000000 loops, best of 3: 0.00719 usec per loop
If this article were actually true, Apple wouldn't exist as the company it is today. Steve Jobs, while not a developer, was undoubtedly brilliant, and most definitely a jerk. It's unhelpful to pigeonhole people and then extrapolate out their actions from there, because for the most part people don't conform to whatever mental model of that stereotype you've built in your head. People are complex beyond imagining. Bes…
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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…
Isnt this a very python thing. Arent all the "brillant jerks" python and ruby programmers. Java and C/C++ guys are the actually smart dudes that know what they are doing and PHP guys just want to get it working and dont give a fuck.