Early on in my career (DevOps/Virtualization/SDN/etc) I landed a role as a junior admin, a backfill for a more senior engineer who was moving up in the organiza

Early on in my career (DevOps/Virtualization/SDN/etc) I landed a role as a junior admin, a backfill for a more senior engineer who was moving up in the organization, but staying on the same team. It could be said he landed somewhere between "Alice" and "Bob", probably due to some mild autism. Without getting into excessive detail, working with him was hard, but by far the most rewarding, educational, and instructive years of my career. I learned more in that short time from that one difficult engineer than the next 3 years combined. I'm not excusing his behavior, but if you're able to handle that style and develop a functional relationship "brilliant but difficult" folks can be an amazing resource. He's the Sr Infrastructure Architect for that organization now, and they've never been doing better. His ability to be difficult but brilliant keeps the overbearing management folks in check, and has allowed the technology platform to move forward dramatically. The one downside (other than the constant testing of my self esteem and resolve) was that I let him teach me D&D and he was a pedantic dick of a GM.