> Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around. Echoing simiones, 'worked around' here means that other productive members of

> Otherwise, if a person is generally toxic enough, they will be worked around. Echoing simiones, 'worked around' here means that other productive members of the community will become disillusioned and leave. The toxic person will become a 'known problem' that is talked about in hushed tones. People will devise small scale strategies for avoiding the bad behaviour. > Note that expelling a person from a project for being a jerk in one or more instances may do more harm than good. What is the value of their technical contributions? Just how much of a jerk were they? We had a publicly 'productive' architect for many years that loved to talk about his technical contributions to the President and CTO, but the actual effect of his contributions was negative. He refused to coordinate with other teams, and everyone who had to interface with his work were forced to rework APIs according to his current whims. He belittled people publicly when they weren't present, and I watched him steal credit for other's achievements. He would then complain that no one appreciated what a hard worker he was to anyone who would listen. On top of all of this, his actual architectural decisions were unsound, as they centralized his work, that only he could maintain, as a core component of the system. In 10 years, he only had one direct report that could tolerate him enough to help with his codebase. > For better or worse, competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges. An unsupported assertion. I've personally found that toxic people are much more willing to aggrandize and lie about their competency to people who don't know better. The best programmers I've worked with were all cooperative and positive 95+% of the time, focused on the product and not their ego.