Yes, be wary of hiring geniuses if you have poor management. Why do we expect that someone who is fantastic at twiddling bits, to also be good at documentation

Yes, be wary of hiring geniuses if you have poor management. Why do we expect that someone who is fantastic at twiddling bits, to also be good at documentation? It's like saying to a Program Manager "great, you specified how it has to work, so now just take a few hours and code everything up". Or "how come you weren't coding as you went along?" The solution is to pair these 'unbalanced' developers with people who are good in other areas. Where was the technical writer who was talking with him on a near daily basis? Or the SDET who worked with him to make sure the important aspects of his design were codified into tests? You can have 10 reasonable devs spend a year getting something to work and have it be reasonably maintainable/documented/tested/etc. (If you actually even have 10 reasonable devs in the first place). Or you can have 1 'genius' do something fantastic in 6 months with minimal support and hope that your other devs can fill in the gaps. Remember, you don't go to war with the army you want--you can't say "this person would be great if only they __". You can only work with them or not work with them. If they are genuinely doing what they think is best for the company, then I recommend you figure out how to work with them. Their challenge is to figure out how to be effective in an organization that doesn't understand, and your challenge is to figure out how to make an organization that can understand.