>In my case, I eventually learned that the odd hours weren't the key to his perceived success. Instead, he used the odd hours to force us to give him only work

>In my case, I eventually learned that the odd hours weren't the key to his perceived success. Instead, he used the odd hours to force us to give him only work that could be accomplished alone. We were lulled into letting him make key architecture decisions in isolation, because no one else was awake or online at the same time to discuss them. Eventually he became the architect by virtue of operating in isolation, where we couldn't discuss his decisions. McCarthy's 1995 book "Dynamics of Software Development" has a chapter devoted to this phenomenon.