I've been a smart jerk, dunno about brilliant but positive about the jerk part. More in the selfless camp, I cared about the company (Sun) a lot and ran rough

I've been a smart jerk, dunno about brilliant but positive about the jerk part. More in the selfless camp, I cared about the company (Sun) a lot and ran rough shod over anyone who got in the way of my quest to make the company better. I definitely hurt some people and, as a young guy, felt that making the company better trumped all of that. And I was a little clueless, I had ADD and no treatment and had no idea that communication happened non-verbally, just wasn't a thin g for me. What made it better was when I added compassion and empathy to my thought process. Instead of barging into someone's office and yelling at them that their code was broken, I'd start with the people stuff. Ask if I could talk to them, ask how they were doing, ask if they knew about this problem in their code. More ask, less yelling. And in my head, i would ask myself is there anything going on in this dude's life that is negative? Sick kid? Divorce? Parent dieing? I was still willing to come to the conclusion that the person sucked at whatever chunk of code it was that was in the spotlight but it took me a lot longer to get there because I was trying to see if there was something else going on that caused the crappy code. Dunno if that helps, I'm sure people told me to think like that but it took me a while to get there. Maybe this shortens the path for someone else.