Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth • Hacker News Board

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#231

Post by elgenie » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 1:38 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #182

elgenie wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software. Survivorship bias doesn't render this an ineffective argument against the simple "no jerks" policy argued for in the article. The contention is "(jerk present) → ¬ (success)", aka "¬ (jerk present) ∨ ¬ (success)". A single case of "(jerk present) ∧ (success)" is sufficient to disprove the direct implication.

> The contention is "(jerk present) → ¬ (success)" The contention in the article is not "you can't ever succeed if you have a jerk on the team" or "a jerk will always cause your team to fail". A property doesn't have to be universal to be common enough to be worth writing about. So no, a single instance of succeeding despite a jerk does not "disprove" anything relevant here.

> To me, the business of software development is way too complex to apply a simple "no jerks" policy. Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.

That's what you replied to with "but survivorship bias!". And the article itself says:

> A “no jerks” policy must be preached and practiced from the highest levels.

... which is a universal and normative call to action.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#232

Post by JamesBarney » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:04 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #78

braveo wrote: post #37

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.

I think abrasive people tend to be very contrarian. And when large companies like Sony make terribly boneheaded decisions it's not because every individual simultaneously made the same stupid decision. It's because everyone was drinking the cool-aid. And abrasive people are generally far less likely to drink the cool-aid. So I think when a a large company makes a boneheaded decision the people arguing against that decision are more likely to be more abrasive than general populace.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#233

Post by gvb » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:04 AM UTC

jrs235 wrote: post #228

gvb wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ 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

Did you have a typo? Or did you mean to only loop ten million times in the first case and 100 million in the second?

I did the lazy approach and let timeit pick the count. Specifying the number of loops doesn't change the result:

$ python -m timeit -n 10000000 'float(5)' 10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.0771 usec per loop

$ python -m timeit -n 10000000 '5.0' 10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.00717 usec per loop

[timeit] provides a simple way to time small bits of Python code. It has both a Command-Line Interface as well as a callable one. It avoids a number of common traps for measuring execution times. See also Tim Peters’ introduction to the “Algorithms” chapter in the Python Cookbook, published by O’Reilly.

Ref: https://docs.python.org/2/library/timeit.html

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#234

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:09 AM UTC

elgenie wrote: post #231

JoshTriplett wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The contention is "(jerk present) → ¬ (success)" The contention in the article is not "you can't ever succeed if you have a jerk on the team" or "a jerk will always cause your team to fail". A property doesn't have to be universal to be common enough to be worth writing about. So no, a single instance of succeeding despite a jerk does not "disprove" anything relevant here.

> To me, the business of software development is way too complex to apply a simple "no jerks" policy. Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software. That's what you replied to with "but survivorship bias!". And the article itself says: > A “no jerks” policy must be preached and practiced from the highest levels. ... which is a universal and normative call to action.

English isn't formal logic, and treating it as such creates a strawman. An article recommending a "no jerks" policy is not a formal theorem that "jerks universally lead to failure", nor can it be refuted and dismissed by an anecdote of "but we had jerks and didn't fail".

If jerks universally led to failure, it would hardly need writing about more than once, as everyone would very quickly have to understand and deal with it. However, because you can sometime succeed in spite of the presence of jerks, that makes it a problem particularly worth writing about.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#235

Post by desireco42 » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:17 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #41

desireco42 wrote: post #9

Honestly, I was always happy to have good developers. The better you are, the bigger pain in the but you can be, as far as I am concerned as long as the code you are delivering is excellent. I am perfectly happy to work around your quirks, within reason of course. And, of course you will be a jerk when you are seeing things others just can't and they can't understand you. After a while you lose patience. What good de…

> What good developer can bring to a team is more valuable then 3-4 polite junior devs that have enthusiasm (which I value also highly) but can't produce quality stuff. All good developers were less-good junior developers once. What I value most is the good, patient developer that turns all the developers around him into good developers over time. They're far more valuable than someone with a high production rate but…

That all sound good but in practice rarely is the case. Good developers and every kind of smart people, scientists, are eccentrics, because they just know more then you and it is hard to explain everything every time.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#236

Post by manigandham » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #14

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.

Same here. The so-called "jerks" are still just people and leadership is all about managing different personalities. I've yet to encounter a case where the even the most difficult person couldn't be handled properly. Any occasional issues are more than worth the productivity increases.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#237

Post by manigandham » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #50

xiaoma wrote: post #30

> "He could crank out 10 times as much work as any of us could in one day." If this is true, it sounds like the best option would have been firing the rest of the team and looking for another like him.

No matter how much two such folks might deserve one another, I'm not sure companies could afford to watch their final two coders refuse to cooperate over trivial shit like line length.

Is that the definition of "jerk" now?

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#238

Post by manigandham » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:26 AM UTC

jayroh wrote: post #108

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.

That's not how reality works. People are self-interested. The team is secondary, at best. This isn't war, it's software development.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#239

Post by JoshTriplett » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:29 AM UTC

desireco42 wrote: post #235

JoshTriplett wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What good developer can bring to a team is more valuable then 3-4 polite junior devs that have enthusiasm (which I value also highly) but can't produce quality stuff. All good developers were less-good junior developers once. What I value most is the good, patient developer that turns all the developers around him into good developers over time. They're far more valuable than someone with a high production rate but…

That all sound good but in practice rarely is the case. Good developers and every kind of smart people, scientists, are eccentrics, because they just know more then you and it is hard to explain everything every time.

> Good developers and every kind of smart people, scientists, are eccentrics

Not always, and "eccentric" doesn't mean "unable to be helpful or kind".

> because they just know more then you and it is hard to explain everything every time

Yes, it's hard. It's a different skill than programming or general intelligence. And it's a harder skill to find or to train. As a rarer skill, it's thus more valuable, and more useful to select for. And as an engineer, developing a rarer skill makes you more valuable, which will improve your career prospects (in both pay and position).

Source: I've been on both sides of numerous performance review processes, and seen what people value at many levels of a technical job ladder.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#240

Post by manigandham » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 2:30 AM UTC

There are just as many, if not more, situations where it's the rest of the team that actually can't handle the so-called "jerk" by being overly sensitive and defensive.