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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

#61

Post by st3v3r »

tn13 wrote: post #36
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…

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.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#62

Post by xiaoma »

smallnamespace wrote: post #57
JoshTriplett wrote: post #29

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…

OTOH, you can make a pretty strong argument that for, say, MS, Oracle, or Apple, it's precisely the 'jerk-y' qualities of their founders and CEOs that led to their success today. Say what you like about MS's business practices during the 90s, but I think the history shows that a large reason they were able to continue their dominance was because of the unfair and frankly anticompetitive practices that they embraced b…

It was directed inward, too. "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've ever heard," was a common phrase at MS in the 90s.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#63

Post by TheOneTrueKyle »

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 which is a whole other topic that blows my mind.

Because I am constantly around these people, they think of me as mean and condescending. No I am not, I just can't be happy producing shit work in a company that doesn't provide me with any value. When I go home, I am not going to have fun, I am going to work on a project that can help me get away from these people. I don't allow anyone to passively say "tgif" or "its monday" to me as if I agree with their mediocre sentiment.

Maybe I am mean and that is why I can't find work, but I rather be mean than mediocre.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#64

Post by phaed »

latenightcoding wrote: post #33

I honestly enjoy working with those "brilliant jerks", if they are actually brilliant I will learn from them. And debating with them is very entertaining.

Same, it accelerates your growth. Can you believe OP? There he has a brilliant dev taking his valuable time to critique his and other people's mediocre work, and all he gets for it is self-protective and defensive reactions from everyone else. OP has admitted that the brilliant jerk had good reasons behind all his comments, yet here he is still complaining about it (ego much?).

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#65

Post by vlunkr »

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…

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 have around.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#66

Post by spacemanmatt »

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 well aware of the simmering annoyance and disagreement available below the surface. You just can't build the kind of momentum we saw with people who many any team member feel unsafe in their role.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#67

Post by rootusrootus »

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.

Maybe, but it's also true that cranking out code is not the same as qualify software development. Lots of people can churn out code, that's the easy part.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#68

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

dcposch wrote: post #25
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…

> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software. Exhibit 0: Linus Torvalds

The article is in the context of a business, not an OSS project. It's apples to oranges.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#69

Post by bdueicnen »

Brilliance is not universally recognized. That is, in this case, very few people can accurately evaluate a programmer's skill.

Previously, I thought myself to be exceptionally good at my craft, and I let that define who I was as a person. Recently, however, I reconnected with an old, vagabond friend. No one in his circle could evaluate my programming competence or even cared about it. To them, I was a socially awkward, single-dimensional guy. That really shattered my bubble.

Re: Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth

#70

Post by flamedoge »

dcposch wrote: post #25
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…

> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software. Exhibit 0: Linus Torvalds

To be fair, Linus is like the last line of defence for Linux. If being a jerk helps remind the strict rules that he envisioned, maybe it's working.
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