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https://mikeseablog.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/the-hero-anti-p...
While I'm sure we can all come up with use-cases where the pain of a genius jerk is outweighed by the potential benefits, it's worth always remembering that realisation of those benefits is the very thing that the jerk jeopardises through his/her bad behaviour.
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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. I…
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This one's tricky, because you're absolutely right, and telling them that won't help them improve. Try asking them, "hey I must have not read that PEP, can you link me to where that's recommended so I can get in sync?", or "hey I read this guide recently and it recommends doing X because ", or (best), "I don't understand why this is recommended, where can I learn more" (which hopefully doesn't end up on a holistic le…
Why appeal to authority here? Experienced, well-intentioned developers should able to have a discussion of the merits of a particular construct without having to turn the discussion into a citation count contest. FWIW, I'm firmly on the 5.0 side.
Personally I like to go with "is accepted by the community" as opposed to "is accepted by most people in this room" or "Greg thinks it's beautiful".
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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.
This seems to be a pretty ubiquitous view nowadays, but neglects the possibility that some projects might go better with an individual contributor just getting on with it.
It feels like larger companies are always reluctant to have a single point of failure, whether it's a machine in Utah going down or Greg getting hit by a bus.
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…
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." - Carl Jung
Playing high status at work could be a coping mechanism. Honestly, if you're unhappy just quit and go work someplace where people are smarter than you are. But if this feeling persists, its probably time to change yourself.
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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.
I can't imagine any smart developers using Ruby anyone, I know because I unfortunately work with Rails and anyone with a brain cell has already left. To me deciding to use Rails isn't a very smart decision
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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.
I'm a machine learning engineer so "unneeded input" is something I rarely consider as a valid statement. Oftentimes when you're arguing the merits of one approach versus a different one, you have to use your rhetorical skills to influence another party. You both believe you have the best solution. You believe your logic is consistent and complete. Emotion is a very powerful signal during discussion. It's a counterpoi…
That is not meritocracy and pretty bad workplace.
There's no such thing as a team where everyone on the team is on the same level - there's always some distribution, this guy has decades of experience and is brilliant, this guy is a junior straight out of college. To every brilliant person on a team (and every team has someone who is relatively brilliant, again because it's a distribution), the people at the other end of the distribution are dead weight. The question is about the personality types of the people on the team and the way that management decides to deal with them.
If management doesn't put the brilliant people into more senior roles, where they are directed to mentor lower-performing people to try and bring the entire team up to a higher performing level, then management is backing the status quo. This breeds frustration and resentment on the part of the high performers.
If management does get the high performers to mentor the low performers, but low performers fail to show improvement, it's management's responsibility to ask why? Does management need to help guide the high performer to help him become a better mentor? Or is the low performer a low performer not because he's inexperienced but because he has no drive for self-improvement? If the low performer remains a low performer over time, why is management keeping him on the team?
Too much management philosophy is falsely dedicated to "feel-good" practice. If your team feels good, then they will be motivated to work for you, and will work at their maximum potential for productivity, and succeed. Team happiness is, of course, important, but so many happy teams fail because happiness is not a cure for mediocrity, and their mediocre products are outcompeted by better options on the market.
What management really needs to ask is whether brilliant jerks are jerks because they enjoy belittling others, or are they jerks because they're frustrated at the team's mediocrity and genuinely desire for the team to write better code? If it's the former, then yeah, get rid of them, they're toxic. But most of the time it's the latter, and their the blame for their frustration lies not with the 10x programmer, but with the manager, for trying to inculcate happy teams instead of productive and effective teams.
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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…
That doesn't sound so much like a brilliant jerk as a midwit egomaniac, which are pretty common on the ground in programming. I've worked with people like that too, and what they're really doing under the guise of making your code better is rewriting modules because it's less trouble than figuring out how the existing code works. Invariably they break something in the rewrite, too, because they didn't understand the…
Which confirms your interpretation and labeling of the 'midwit egomaniac'.
The sad part - it is not usually immediately clear which kind of jerk your dealing with, since they behave the same!
Secondarily, it is not immediately clear to an outsider upon observation which is which either...
Summary I drew: There are genuine mental health related conditions that can cause someone to be a jerk AND still be brilliant. When you find that, you have to first separate them off so as not to detract from others work. Secondly if they can't cut it then let them go.