4 ms·

My sympathy for the guy, stuff like this sucks deep on a personal level and he should have gravitated towards a higher level team that values his contributions

My sympathy for the guy, stuff like this sucks deep on a personal level and he should have gravitated towards a higher level team that values his contributions more. That being said, I've worked with my share of brilliant jerks and couldn't say it any better than this Firstround article: http://firstround.com/review/why-firing-brilliant-assholes-is-required-to-build-a-great-engineering-culture/ http://firstround.com/review/why-firing-brilliant-assholes-i... I'm tolerating exactly one brilliant jerk in my team right now, but it's just because he's the rare "selfless brilliant jerk type" ( http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-11-13/brilliant-jerks.... ) and he's just so damn productive and such a nice guy from the inside...

commandlinefan 9y ago
Well... one thing about the whole "brilliant jerk" notion. Although I've learned the same lessons as the author the hard way, and am super mr. helpful these days, always treading carefully not to hurt anybody's feelings, I may have been considered a jerk by some in my past. (I'll leave it to others to decide whether I was a brilliant, mostly competent, or completely useless jerk, but my time was always in demand). I've worked with people who were definitely considered brilliant jerks, to the point where they were fired for being brilliant jerks. Yet, invariably, I found those people by far the easiest to get along with. Every time. They knew what they were doing. I didn't have to explain to them that TCP and HTTP were two separate things and yes, if there's no key involved, you're not encrypting something, just obfuscating it. If they asked me to do something, it was something specific and they actually described what they needed done. They provided enough context that it was obvious whether it was done or not. I can't say that about most others - regular jerk, regular nice guy or otherwise.

commandlinefan 9y ago

Well... one thing about the whole "brilliant jerk" notion. Although I've learned the same lessons as the author the hard way, and am super mr. helpful these days, always treading carefully not to hurt anybody's feelings, I may have been considered a jerk by some in my past. (I'll leave it to others to decide whether I was a brilliant, mostly competent, or completely useless jerk, but my time was always in demand). I've worked with people who were definitely considered brilliant jerks, to the point where they were fired for being brilliant jerks. Yet, invariably, I found those people by far the easiest to get along with. Every time. They knew what they were doing. I didn't have to explain to them that TCP and HTTP were two separate things and yes, if there's no key involved, you're not encrypting something, just obfuscating it. If they asked me to do something, it was something specific and they actually described what they needed done. They provided enough context that it was obvious whether it was done or not. I can't say that about most others - regular jerk, regular nice guy or otherwise.