5 ms·

When Smart People are Bad Employees

102 points by mbrubeck 16y ago

clistctrl 16y ago
Here's the previous conversation about this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416
- ericHosick 16y ago
  This was becoming way too Déjà vu for me. I thought I was loosing it. Thanks for the link to the previous conversation.
greattypo 16y ago
This post was great.. when I read it 2 months ago
- HelloBeautiful 16y ago
  What do you mean? You think it should not be mentioned ever again?
  - rdl 16y ago
    I wish there were a way to bring topics back and still retain the link to the previous discussion. Maybe years later, there would be new insight into this topic, but for a lot of stuff, the comments of 2 months ago are just as valid as anything you'd say today. searchyc is great, but no one really finds new comments buried on old posts now. For topics which have lasting value (vs "what will apple release tomorrow"), some kind of curated repository of interesting articles would be great.
    - bartonfink 16y ago
      Would it make sense for HN to do something like the following? Pull link out of submission and check database to see if that link has already been submitted. If it has, either automatically insert a comment containing links to the older discussion(s) OR append those links to the post itself? It's going to be fairly brittle, because you're only comparing the addresses and not the values stored, but it seems like it wouldn't need too much work. Anyone have any thoughts?
  - xiongchiamiov 16y ago
    I think he's indicating that the value of the information has decayed over time - it seems that less and less people are employees now, as the robots have been steadily taking over.
daimyoyo 16y ago
There is another important example that the author didn't mention. The inquisitor. Anyone who's been in the workforce long enough knows the guy who can't ever accept the directions he gets without questioning every aspect of the decision. Also, this person tends to have a problem with authority and will always test his or her boundaries. That said they tend to be among the most creative thinkers in the entire company and for that reason they can be an important member of the staff.
- phlux 16y ago
  Heh. I know that type well. A guy that I had hired as an intern many years ago was that type - to such a degree that once when asked to erect a shelf that we got for the IT lab was asking why it was using the type of screws that it came with and stopping and pondering this for several minutes. He is now a senior sys ad in the valley - and very very smart - but his challenges to authority and propensity to ask questions just to be obtuse grew tiresome.
  - HelloBeautiful 16y ago
    Haha, I used to be an employee like that. You know those methodologies like DDD, that say: 'understand the business problem before coding'. Well when I was doing it managers would go crazy and say I should not create confusion, but start working. Once to find 6 months later that a 15 men team hasn't done anything useful ... In all cases I can remember thinking and asking at the beginning was/would have been worth the time.
    - phlux 16y ago
      The difference here was that the guy liked to try to be specifically obtuse and difficult. It wasn't a matter of thinking through a problem before hand - it was an exercise in proving/looking smart. Spending 5+ minutes consternating over the type of screws that came with the shelf is not "thinking ahead" :)
      - bugsy 16y ago
dhjtykyu 16y ago
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jeremymcanally 16y ago
I think this entry could just as easily be renamed "When People are Bad Employees." I've encountered people that fit these profiles and wouldn't classify them as particularly clever.
Legion 16y ago
Is the layout of this site borked for any other Chrome users? Looks fine in Firefox, but the layout (sidebar & header) are gone in (my) Chrome OS X. Want to be sure it's not a script-blocking or ad-blocking plugin doing it (I think I disabled them all).
- zebseven 16y ago
  Looks fine to me.
ohyes 16y ago
"The Heretic: Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons." Statistically speaking, the employee is probably right. But at most companies, building a case for this is an exercise in tautology. Maybe take him seriously and at least make it look like you are being proactive about his issues. "The Flake: ... he completed the project in 72 hours." He did two weeks of coding in 3 days. If he doesn't show up for the next two weeks, and the product had no major flaws, who cares? Drug addiction and mental disorder are a separate issue, in my opinion. If he is really as good as it seemed, it would have behooved the employer to get him into rehab/psychological treatment. "The Jerk: ...sounds like House M.D." WHY did you put someone with no people skills in a management position? (Senior management to boot). It makes very little sense. Someone who is a jerk isn't going to be good at managing people. A jerk could be a great individual contributor, as long as the jerk does his work correctly. I feel like it is more about making the right concessions given the individual, and making sure you don't put people into positions where their faults are amplified. An analogy to this post would be finding that a puzzle piece doesn't go where you want to put it, and therefore declaring that it is a bad puzzle piece (even though it fits somewhere else just fine).
sarahmccrum 16y ago
I once had an employer who seemed (to me) to prefer people who were (in my opinion) pretty inappropriate for their jobs because they had so little ability to do them. I found it very difficult to understand at the time, because I generally like to have people around who are better than me at most things, so I can concentrate on what I do best. It was interesting over the years, though, to see what happened. That particular employer was a great believer that anyone can learn anything, and she was incredibly patient with some people who really were not gifted at all in their area of work. Above all she valued loyalty (and in key areas, such as finance, she preferred absolute stupidity). I learned a lot from her. I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed, whereas the slower, more loyal people were still there getting the job done. I also learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance. I saw that she liked stupid people in sensitive areas because then they couldn't mess up in any serious way. They made lots of small mistakes but they didn't have the ability to make big mistakes and they always asked whenever they didn't understand what they were doing. Personally I think there is a balance here. I would find it hard to go as far as she did, but it certainly caused me to look at people decisions in a different way, which I would never have come up with if I hadn't seen her in action.
- keeptrying 16y ago
  This is very true. I've seen it at all levels of BigCo. Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works (unfortunately).
  - S_A_P 16y ago
    The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- - I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely. I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.
    - forensic 16y ago
      >The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- ..in Texas
Nobido 16y ago
This is interesting. I just finished listening to an old episode of This American Life about this same subject. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/r... (it's the prologue if you want to listen) the story was about an experiment that was done to test the effects of these same three personality types on a working environment (although they called the flake the slacker, and the heretic was a bit different ,as the depressive) To do this they repeatedly inserted an actor who would display one of these behaviors into a working group and study the outcome - and groups with any kind of disruptive co worker ended up doing considerably worse on their projects. Also interesting, the other members of the group took on the traits of the actor... When he was acting a jerk, the others in the group became rude not only to the jerk but to each other. When he was the slacker, everyone else started slacking more also. And when he was the depressive everyone else became more depressed. The only time the actor did not effect the groups performance was in one team where a particularly charismatic member was able to diffuse all situations where he was being a jerk.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Stormbringer 16y ago
From the article: "Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team." Translation: keep your head down, don't rock the boat and don't have any passion for what you do. This is the recipe for 'success' (i.e. continued employment) at big companies. "As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them. However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company." No. These so called 'agendas' don't just mysteriously appear. What happens is that the big company goes to great lengths to hire smart people, and then even greater lengths to ignore them. At this point, the smart employee has two options (1) stay or (2) leave. From sarahmccrum's comment in this thread: "I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed" That's the second scenario, the smart person says "screw it" and leaves. Sometimes that is the most mature decision. If some behaviour that is bad for the company is deeply engrained, is it really worth the futile tilting at windmills quest to get it changed? Perhaps they have gone on such crusades before only to get burnt (at the stake). In the first scenario, where they stay, what are they going to do? They can (a) decide to ignore the thing that is bad for the company, (b) decide to keep banging their head against the wall in the same way, (c) escalate - by trying to change the way that they communicate the seriousness of the problem or the audience (brass didn't listen, maybe the grass(roots) will?). (a) shows low levels of motivation or commitment to the company (but hey, apparently that is a good thing so long as you hide it (sarcasm)), additionally, it can be genuinely difficult for smart people to ignore situations that are sub-optimal. If you're a programmer and your job basically boils down to 'fix things' ... it is very hard to draw the line and not try to fix a broken process. It is that itch that needs to be scratched. (b) is just going to continue to get them ignored, or perhaps labelled as 'not a team player'. Way to go corporate culture. Eventually they'll get fired or tired and switch to a different strategy. (c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme... ...consider if you will the problem of identifying exactly who the people are to get on board with the change. Power flows in strange ways in big companies, it isn't always just a linear thing directly from the top to the bottom. In my experience it is almost never linear. Identifying the true power structure in a corporation (for a particular change that is required) is enormously difficult. Moreover, the underlying power structure can change depending on what the problem is, or over time, or any of many different variables can effect what the true power structure is on day X for problem Y. Becoming a better communicator is practically trivial compared to the problem of identifying the correct power structure to address the problem. So you might think the moral of the story is that geeks need to become better communicators. But NO! Certainly not! Becoming a better communicator is the path to either management or architecture, neither of which is a fate that I would wish on anybody. For the smart person stuck in a stupid situation, the smart thing is just to move on. It doesn't matter that you are not loyal to the company, you gave it a good shot. Try to leave on good terms (itself a marketing problem (blah blah professional development etc)). Loyalty doesn't matter, because the company has zero loyalty to you. And true loyalty must be bi-directional.
bugsy 16y ago
You know, I bet the cocaine fiend guy wasn't even on cocaine. How would the company know this? If they had insurance coverage and he went into rehab it would be seriously violation of medical privacy for this to be revealed to the company. If he did go into rehab, the article author would have mentioned it given that he claims to know all about the guy's cocaine habit as well as his mental health history, which he is now disclosing in public. Boy I would hate to have a former employer get on the internet and post articles about how they think I have a cocaine addiction. I suspect it was all speculation, and probably wrong. Though when cornered, to save face, the author would likely deny all this and claim to have proof. I took that one a bit personally myself as I could relate to it. Let me tell you how that went down with me. Went to work for a company, gave it my all. Did in 3 days what took other employees six months, and with fewer bugs and faster performance. The company rode me hard, demanded I worked more and more. Soon I was responsible for nearly all the critical projects. I was working 16 hours a day 7 days a week. My boss refused to let me even take Sundays off because of the crisis. Yet my salary was based on 40 hrs a week, no overtime, so when I figured my effective hourly rate if I was a hourly worker, it was less than I could make in fast food. Finally after a year of this I cracked and got very sick, suffering total exhaustion. I could not come in to work. The work then fired me. I later hear them tell people they suspected I had a drug problem. So yeah, maybe I was even the guy he is talking about. Who knows. There were no drugs though. That was the first couple jobs out of college. After that I wised up and started setting boundaries. But eventually I had to strike out on my own because too many companies will take advantage of diligent workers. Looking back at it all I see it like a rich guy that buys an expensive race horse and then runs the horse in every race he can find without rests between until the race horse collapses, and then he sends the horse off to the glue factory with no loyalty to what the horse won him. Another example is the spoiled trust fund kid that buys a ferrari and drives it around and never changes the oil and after a year the engine freezes up, a total loss. This is just stupidity and failure to manage your investment properly. There are a lot of managers out there like this. Any company that routinely requires overtime is a company that has failed and is run by incompetent management. When the overtime is required of employees who don't even get paid overtime it makes the whole thing just that more abusive and exploitative. This all is especially absurd for those of us that produce at 10-30 times the rate and quality of the average developers. I always would find it infuriating to be told I must work 112 hours in a week during which I would write some 8,500 lines of complex code and there is another guy paid the same who writes 13 lines in the same week and goes home after 40 hours because his contributions aren't all that important anyway so no point in keeping him late. Anyone in this situation do as I did. Leave and start your own company.
farout 16y ago
(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme... >>I used to be in sales . I have made millions for companies. Sales was easy since I was helping people with pain they already knew and were looking to remove it. I also wanted them to feel good about the company so they would tell all their friends. Referral are sweet! It always frustrated me that I could not sell management many of my ideas. Part of the problem was they saw no problem. Lying to customers. No problem. Screwing up services. No problem. Etc. I got tired of it. That is why I now program.

102 points by mbrubeck 16y ago

Here's the previous conversation about this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416

ericHosick 16y ago
This was becoming way too Déjà vu for me. I thought I was loosing it. Thanks for the link to the previous conversation.

greattypo 16y ago

This post was great.. when I read it 2 months ago

HelloBeautiful 16y ago
What do you mean? You think it should not be mentioned ever again?
- rdl 16y ago
  I wish there were a way to bring topics back and still retain the link to the previous discussion. Maybe years later, there would be new insight into this topic, but for a lot of stuff, the comments of 2 months ago are just as valid as anything you'd say today. searchyc is great, but no one really finds new comments buried on old posts now. For topics which have lasting value (vs "what will apple release tomorrow"), some kind of curated repository of interesting articles would be great.
  - bartonfink 16y ago
    Would it make sense for HN to do something like the following? Pull link out of submission and check database to see if that link has already been submitted. If it has, either automatically insert a comment containing links to the older discussion(s) OR append those links to the post itself? It's going to be fairly brittle, because you're only comparing the addresses and not the values stored, but it seems like it wouldn't need too much work. Anyone have any thoughts?
- xiongchiamiov 16y ago
  I think he's indicating that the value of the information has decayed over time - it seems that less and less people are employees now, as the robots have been steadily taking over.

daimyoyo 16y ago

There is another important example that the author didn't mention. The inquisitor. Anyone who's been in the workforce long enough knows the guy who can't ever accept the directions he gets without questioning every aspect of the decision. Also, this person tends to have a problem with authority and will always test his or her boundaries. That said they tend to be among the most creative thinkers in the entire company and for that reason they can be an important member of the staff.

phlux 16y ago
Heh. I know that type well. A guy that I had hired as an intern many years ago was that type - to such a degree that once when asked to erect a shelf that we got for the IT lab was asking why it was using the type of screws that it came with and stopping and pondering this for several minutes. He is now a senior sys ad in the valley - and very very smart - but his challenges to authority and propensity to ask questions just to be obtuse grew tiresome.
- HelloBeautiful 16y ago
  Haha, I used to be an employee like that. You know those methodologies like DDD, that say: 'understand the business problem before coding'. Well when I was doing it managers would go crazy and say I should not create confusion, but start working. Once to find 6 months later that a 15 men team hasn't done anything useful ... In all cases I can remember thinking and asking at the beginning was/would have been worth the time.
  - phlux 16y ago
    The difference here was that the guy liked to try to be specifically obtuse and difficult. It wasn't a matter of thinking through a problem before hand - it was an exercise in proving/looking smart. Spending 5+ minutes consternating over the type of screws that came with the shelf is not "thinking ahead" :)
    - bugsy 16y ago

dhjtykyu 16y ago

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jeremymcanally 16y ago

I think this entry could just as easily be renamed "When People are Bad Employees." I've encountered people that fit these profiles and wouldn't classify them as particularly clever.

Legion 16y ago

Is the layout of this site borked for any other Chrome users? Looks fine in Firefox, but the layout (sidebar & header) are gone in (my) Chrome OS X. Want to be sure it's not a script-blocking or ad-blocking plugin doing it (I think I disabled them all).

zebseven 16y ago
Looks fine to me.

ohyes 16y ago

"The Heretic: Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons." Statistically speaking, the employee is probably right. But at most companies, building a case for this is an exercise in tautology. Maybe take him seriously and at least make it look like you are being proactive about his issues. "The Flake: ... he completed the project in 72 hours." He did two weeks of coding in 3 days. If he doesn't show up for the next two weeks, and the product had no major flaws, who cares? Drug addiction and mental disorder are a separate issue, in my opinion. If he is really as good as it seemed, it would have behooved the employer to get him into rehab/psychological treatment. "The Jerk: ...sounds like House M.D." WHY did you put someone with no people skills in a management position? (Senior management to boot). It makes very little sense. Someone who is a jerk isn't going to be good at managing people. A jerk could be a great individual contributor, as long as the jerk does his work correctly. I feel like it is more about making the right concessions given the individual, and making sure you don't put people into positions where their faults are amplified. An analogy to this post would be finding that a puzzle piece doesn't go where you want to put it, and therefore declaring that it is a bad puzzle piece (even though it fits somewhere else just fine).

sarahmccrum 16y ago

I once had an employer who seemed (to me) to prefer people who were (in my opinion) pretty inappropriate for their jobs because they had so little ability to do them. I found it very difficult to understand at the time, because I generally like to have people around who are better than me at most things, so I can concentrate on what I do best. It was interesting over the years, though, to see what happened. That particular employer was a great believer that anyone can learn anything, and she was incredibly patient with some people who really were not gifted at all in their area of work. Above all she valued loyalty (and in key areas, such as finance, she preferred absolute stupidity). I learned a lot from her. I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed, whereas the slower, more loyal people were still there getting the job done. I also learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance. I saw that she liked stupid people in sensitive areas because then they couldn't mess up in any serious way. They made lots of small mistakes but they didn't have the ability to make big mistakes and they always asked whenever they didn't understand what they were doing. Personally I think there is a balance here. I would find it hard to go as far as she did, but it certainly caused me to look at people decisions in a different way, which I would never have come up with if I hadn't seen her in action.

keeptrying 16y ago
This is very true. I've seen it at all levels of BigCo. Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works (unfortunately).
- S_A_P 16y ago
  The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- - I don't watch or care to talk sports. - I don't / won't hunt wildlife. - I don't discuss female anatomy freely. I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I see all 3 in equal parts quite often.
  - forensic 16y ago
    >The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo- ..in Texas

Nobido 16y ago

This is interesting. I just finished listening to an old episode of This American Life about this same subject. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/370/r... (it's the prologue if you want to listen) the story was about an experiment that was done to test the effects of these same three personality types on a working environment (although they called the flake the slacker, and the heretic was a bit different ,as the depressive) To do this they repeatedly inserted an actor who would display one of these behaviors into a working group and study the outcome - and groups with any kind of disruptive co worker ended up doing considerably worse on their projects. Also interesting, the other members of the group took on the traits of the actor... When he was acting a jerk, the others in the group became rude not only to the jerk but to each other. When he was the slacker, everyone else started slacking more also. And when he was the depressive everyone else became more depressed. The only time the actor did not effect the groups performance was in one team where a particularly charismatic member was able to diffuse all situations where he was being a jerk.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Stormbringer 16y ago

From the article: "Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team." Translation: keep your head down, don't rock the boat and don't have any passion for what you do. This is the recipe for 'success' (i.e. continued employment) at big companies. "As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them. However, sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the company." No. These so called 'agendas' don't just mysteriously appear. What happens is that the big company goes to great lengths to hire smart people, and then even greater lengths to ignore them. At this point, the smart employee has two options (1) stay or (2) leave. From sarahmccrum's comment in this thread: "I saw that most of the clever people who were around left, often when they were most needed" That's the second scenario, the smart person says "screw it" and leaves. Sometimes that is the most mature decision. If some behaviour that is bad for the company is deeply engrained, is it really worth the futile tilting at windmills quest to get it changed? Perhaps they have gone on such crusades before only to get burnt (at the stake). In the first scenario, where they stay, what are they going to do? They can (a) decide to ignore the thing that is bad for the company, (b) decide to keep banging their head against the wall in the same way, (c) escalate - by trying to change the way that they communicate the seriousness of the problem or the audience (brass didn't listen, maybe the grass(roots) will?). (a) shows low levels of motivation or commitment to the company (but hey, apparently that is a good thing so long as you hide it (sarcasm)), additionally, it can be genuinely difficult for smart people to ignore situations that are sub-optimal. If you're a programmer and your job basically boils down to 'fix things' ... it is very hard to draw the line and not try to fix a broken process. It is that itch that needs to be scratched. (b) is just going to continue to get them ignored, or perhaps labelled as 'not a team player'. Way to go corporate culture. Eventually they'll get fired or tired and switch to a different strategy. (c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme... ...consider if you will the problem of identifying exactly who the people are to get on board with the change. Power flows in strange ways in big companies, it isn't always just a linear thing directly from the top to the bottom. In my experience it is almost never linear. Identifying the true power structure in a corporation (for a particular change that is required) is enormously difficult. Moreover, the underlying power structure can change depending on what the problem is, or over time, or any of many different variables can effect what the true power structure is on day X for problem Y. Becoming a better communicator is practically trivial compared to the problem of identifying the correct power structure to address the problem. So you might think the moral of the story is that geeks need to become better communicators. But NO! Certainly not! Becoming a better communicator is the path to either management or architecture, neither of which is a fate that I would wish on anybody. For the smart person stuck in a stupid situation, the smart thing is just to move on. It doesn't matter that you are not loyal to the company, you gave it a good shot. Try to leave on good terms (itself a marketing problem (blah blah professional development etc)). Loyalty doesn't matter, because the company has zero loyalty to you. And true loyalty must be bi-directional.

bugsy 16y ago

You know, I bet the cocaine fiend guy wasn't even on cocaine. How would the company know this? If they had insurance coverage and he went into rehab it would be seriously violation of medical privacy for this to be revealed to the company. If he did go into rehab, the article author would have mentioned it given that he claims to know all about the guy's cocaine habit as well as his mental health history, which he is now disclosing in public. Boy I would hate to have a former employer get on the internet and post articles about how they think I have a cocaine addiction. I suspect it was all speculation, and probably wrong. Though when cornered, to save face, the author would likely deny all this and claim to have proof. I took that one a bit personally myself as I could relate to it. Let me tell you how that went down with me. Went to work for a company, gave it my all. Did in 3 days what took other employees six months, and with fewer bugs and faster performance. The company rode me hard, demanded I worked more and more. Soon I was responsible for nearly all the critical projects. I was working 16 hours a day 7 days a week. My boss refused to let me even take Sundays off because of the crisis. Yet my salary was based on 40 hrs a week, no overtime, so when I figured my effective hourly rate if I was a hourly worker, it was less than I could make in fast food. Finally after a year of this I cracked and got very sick, suffering total exhaustion. I could not come in to work. The work then fired me. I later hear them tell people they suspected I had a drug problem. So yeah, maybe I was even the guy he is talking about. Who knows. There were no drugs though. That was the first couple jobs out of college. After that I wised up and started setting boundaries. But eventually I had to strike out on my own because too many companies will take advantage of diligent workers. Looking back at it all I see it like a rich guy that buys an expensive race horse and then runs the horse in every race he can find without rests between until the race horse collapses, and then he sends the horse off to the glue factory with no loyalty to what the horse won him. Another example is the spoiled trust fund kid that buys a ferrari and drives it around and never changes the oil and after a year the engine freezes up, a total loss. This is just stupidity and failure to manage your investment properly. There are a lot of managers out there like this. Any company that routinely requires overtime is a company that has failed and is run by incompetent management. When the overtime is required of employees who don't even get paid overtime it makes the whole thing just that more abusive and exploitative. This all is especially absurd for those of us that produce at 10-30 times the rate and quality of the average developers. I always would find it infuriating to be told I must work 112 hours in a week during which I would write some 8,500 lines of complex code and there is another guy paid the same who writes 13 lines in the same week and goes home after 40 hours because his contributions aren't all that important anyway so no point in keeping him late. Anyone in this situation do as I did. Leave and start your own company.

farout 16y ago

(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out meme... >>I used to be in sales . I have made millions for companies. Sales was easy since I was helping people with pain they already knew and were looking to remove it. I also wanted them to feel good about the company so they would tell all their friends. Referral are sweet! It always frustrated me that I could not sell management many of my ideas. Part of the problem was they saw no problem. Lying to customers. No problem. Screwing up services. No problem. Etc. I got tired of it. That is why I now program.