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To play devils advocate: If he was as brilliant as you imply perhaps he SHOULD have been the one making the key decisions under his purview anyway. This almost

by fjabre 7y ago

To play devils advocate: If he was as brilliant as you imply perhaps he SHOULD have been the one making the key decisions under his purview anyway. This almost sounds like bitterness coming from the other side of the team. Not everything is a team decision and nor should it be. Often times brilliant engineers, in order to express that brilliance, need to be left alone by over zealous managers and jealous teammates that would rather argue than get work done.

xmalloccc 7y ago
Yeah, this is a general problem with these threads here. If there are 5% brilliant engineers, the other 95% will answer here how horrible the 5% really are. Never mind that the 5% do most of the work and the other 95% attach themselves to a project, criticize and obstruct the 5% and take the credit for the project.
derf_ 7y ago
Hello, fellow brilliant engineer here. In my experience, it is not as often as you might think. The key issue comes down to brilliance coupled with selfishness. If you look for it, you can see some common themes in these comments: "...the other team members were all forced to work around his refactor and waste time updating their PRs to match his work," or "Meanwhile we were all left to deal with his fallout," or "...this particular eng ... ended up costing almost as much to clean up his mess as the value we got from him in the first place." We have all had to work with that guy. In the early part of my career, I have been that guy. People are not arguing because they don't understand your brilliance and are jealous of your productivity. It is because you are making their lives harder. That is what makes people bitter. Turn the problem around: instead of asking "how can I get all of these over-zealous, jealous people to leave me alone", ask, "how can I apply my brilliance to make their lives easier instead of harder?" Unless you are doing something basically trivial, there is usually too much work for any one person to do it all by themselves, no matter how brilliant. You need those people. So help them out. You will have a much better time. And so will they.
PragmaticPulp 7y ago
> To play devils advocate: If he was as brilliant as you imply perhaps he SHOULD have been the one making the key decisions under his purview anyway. I think you missed the point. It's easy to operate in a vacuum. If you maneuver yourself into a position where you can only ever operate in a vacuum, you avoid the real difficult work: Coordination, communication, cooperation. That work doesn't just disappear, though. The rest of the team has to pick up the slack, fix the leftover bugs, work around the lone wolf's quirks, and so on. If a project requires more than a single person to scale, then those people need to work together as peers. If you let one person run away with the fun work and leave everyone else to clean up the bugs and pick up the scraps, it's not a sustainable situation.
kraigie 7y ago
>To play devils advocate: If he was as brilliant as you imply perhaps he SHOULD have been the one making the key decisions under his purview anyway If he should have been. Then he should probably have been lead eng or something. His authority and actions were mismatched. Management can change either side of the equation.

by fjabre 7y ago

xmalloccc 7y ago

Yeah, this is a general problem with these threads here. If there are 5% brilliant engineers, the other 95% will answer here how horrible the 5% really are. Never mind that the 5% do most of the work and the other 95% attach themselves to a project, criticize and obstruct the 5% and take the credit for the project.

derf_ 7y ago

Hello, fellow brilliant engineer here. In my experience, it is not as often as you might think. The key issue comes down to brilliance coupled with selfishness. If you look for it, you can see some common themes in these comments: "...the other team members were all forced to work around his refactor and waste time updating their PRs to match his work," or "Meanwhile we were all left to deal with his fallout," or "...this particular eng ... ended up costing almost as much to clean up his mess as the value we got from him in the first place." We have all had to work with that guy. In the early part of my career, I have been that guy. People are not arguing because they don't understand your brilliance and are jealous of your productivity. It is because you are making their lives harder. That is what makes people bitter. Turn the problem around: instead of asking "how can I get all of these over-zealous, jealous people to leave me alone", ask, "how can I apply my brilliance to make their lives easier instead of harder?" Unless you are doing something basically trivial, there is usually too much work for any one person to do it all by themselves, no matter how brilliant. You need those people. So help them out. You will have a much better time. And so will they.

PragmaticPulp 7y ago

> To play devils advocate: If he was as brilliant as you imply perhaps he SHOULD have been the one making the key decisions under his purview anyway. I think you missed the point. It's easy to operate in a vacuum. If you maneuver yourself into a position where you can only ever operate in a vacuum, you avoid the real difficult work: Coordination, communication, cooperation. That work doesn't just disappear, though. The rest of the team has to pick up the slack, fix the leftover bugs, work around the lone wolf's quirks, and so on. If a project requires more than a single person to scale, then those people need to work together as peers. If you let one person run away with the fun work and leave everyone else to clean up the bugs and pick up the scraps, it's not a sustainable situation.

kraigie 7y ago

>To play devils advocate: If he was as brilliant as you imply perhaps he SHOULD have been the one making the key decisions under his purview anyway If he should have been. Then he should probably have been lead eng or something. His authority and actions were mismatched. Management can change either side of the equation.