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I will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk. The competent jerks destroy team morale, make good people leave, and par

I will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk. The competent jerks destroy team morale, make good people leave, and paralyze junior employees and those lacking self-confidence. They may be good at their job, but they make others worse. Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up. Of course, ideally, everyone is somewhere in that top right quadrant, but in my experience on large enough teams you usually have at least one not so nice person on the team and one or two not so competent people on the team.

etempleton 4y ago
Follow up: I have seen a mass exodus of a high performance team because of a single competent jerk that was allowed to wreck havoc. I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver. I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.
- fvdessen 4y ago
  Worst case scenario that i've seen with 'incompetent nice' is when somehow a team was composed of only such people. Nothing they made worked, but because they were all nice it couldn't really be admitted that it was because of their incompetence, so other competent people were pulled in to help, but then under incompetent leadership, so they were rendered ineffective.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > but then under incompetent leadership, so they were rendered ineffective This made me realise that I'm pretty tolerant of incompetence so long as it's junior to me (where I can help them improve). But make me work for somebody incompetent and I will call them out on it, escalate it to their manager if need be, and leave pretty quickly if the situation isn't remedied.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    You pretty much described most of Big Tech.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging. They tend to climb management chain and then you are left with leaders who can't understand anything, that is by far worse than what any competent jerk can accomplish.
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    A know-nothing hands-on manager is a real headache, but a hands-off one may just let a team do their own thing?
    - Jensson 4y ago
      That can work short term if the team is still full of competent people, but wont work long term since the manager is in charge of hiring, firing and promoting people.
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    Is it? What happens when you need feature XYZ, and the competent jerk puts down their foot and says the system can't support said feature because of the way he drove the team to design it? Then you're left with a dilemma where you either lose your talent or lose the feature. This kind of thing was something I saw when I did contract work because said competent jerks knew they could get their way.
- paulddraper 4y ago
  The WORST damage can be caused in socialization not performance. But the most common damage is done by performance not in socialization.
- theamk 4y ago
  I've seen multiple competent people quit the team, citing overwork and team's inability to deliver results. The reason that more than half of the team were "incompetent but nice". They'd take weeks to do what other team members would do in days, and would require a lot of support too. But they'd still take headcount spots, so the team could not hire more people without firing someone first, and everyone was so nice....
- neotrope 4y ago
  > I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging. bullshit. how many incidents are due to incompetence? how many alerts were just forgotten? how many customers churn because of low quality ux? how many additional incompetent employees were hired because your nice friend let them through? incompetence erodes culture, leads to bureaucracy and the slow death of a company.
- manicennui 4y ago
  Masses of incompetent people are the very reason why dealing with most large companies and their products and services is such a nightmare.
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    I think there is a simpler explanation: nobody knows how to run a large organization. Large organizations are effectively superintelligences, but extremely dysfunctional ones. As soon as someone figures out how to share information and coordinate work in a large group of people, we will get our technological singularity. Even without any AI.
- arp242 4y ago
  I left because of "incompetent nice" people as I was tired of the never-ending torrent of incompetent nonsense I had to deal with and I felt the end-product just wasn't very good or something I was proud of. "Jerk" is really too rough of a classifier; someone who communicates a bit like a jerk but is fundamentally well-meaning is someone I can work with; if you have a daily working relationship you can learn to just read over the snark or whatever. Someone who insists on their view being forced through and will bully, insult, or use other tactics to do so is something I have a lot more problems with, as are the "this is the one true correct way and if you don't see my brilliance then you are most likely mentally retarded and should visit a hospital for an examination" type of people.
- jahewson 4y ago
  I’ve seen “incompetent but nice” people destroy entire companies, as in those companies no longer exist.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver. This sounds like many American police departments.
Kranar 4y ago
I used to think the same way as you, and then I started a company and had to pay out of pocket for employees, and the sad truth that I almost hate myself for admitting is that if you have to pick between incompetent but nice, and competent but a jerk, you take the jerk. And yes, multiple people will even quit because you picked the jerk over the nice guy, and I still found it's worth it to take the jerk because of how competency scales. A good/competent software engineer can genuinely do the work of many, many mediocre developers and you're almost always better off with a small number of really solid developers over a large number of nice but mediocre ones. Now of course we can always exaggerate things to an extreme and compare a racist, sexist, jerk who swears nonstop, to someone who is mildly incompetent, and there are certain principles and boundaries that are worth upholding with respect to how people treat each other regardless of their productivity, but in actuality that's not really the difficult choice you end up facing. The really difficult choice you end up facing is someone who is nice and gets along with people but is ultimately too dependent on others to do their job versus someone who works independently and does an excellent job but is very blunt and can be an asshole in regards to the expectations they hold others to. Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight. And finally, I have observed that in the long run, competent people tend to prefer to work with others whose skill they respect and they feel they can learn from because they're really good at their job, compared to working with someone who is pleasant but is always dependent on others. Being nice is a good short term skill to have, but people get used to those who are nice but they never get used to someone who is incompetent.
- lisasays 4y ago
  Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight. Speaking bluntly isn't what is meant by being an asshole/jerk. What we're talking about here is the completely gratuitous, "I'm so valuable here that I can get away with it" abusive behavior that has no correlation with performative ability.
  - Kranar 4y ago
bawolff 4y ago
I think incompetent but nice can also lead to morale problems. Not as bad as the jerk situation, but eventually everyone notices this one person who does no work but is still getting paid. Which can lead to jealously and feelings of unfairness.
- onos 4y ago
  It gets worse when they become the norm. Then the rockstars start to think “why am I doing the work for five people but getting paid only 20% more” then they leave.
  - rawgabbit 4y ago
    It is more like why do I have five people who boss me around in addition to my real boss?
- etempleton 4y ago
  It is a balancing act for sure.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  "Doing no work" would be great. Understanding the commit they made last thing on Friday, which is incomprehensible and has broken your work, is not so great. In my last job, I worked with three incompetents, none of whom were jerks, in a team of ten. I reckon the rest of us had to do twice the work to navigate their mistakes. This is the "Please stop writing code" syndrome.
rukuu001 4y ago
One of the few very real regrets I have about the way we've run our business is not getting rid of a brilliant asshole sooner. It was boggling: a) How good he was. Just like really really good quality of work. b) How bad he was. Crying client. Regularly destroying team morale and productivity with incredible drama.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  > One of the few very real regrets I have about the way we've run our business is not getting rid of a brilliant asshole sooner. If you can't isolate the brilliant asshole in a back office somewhere, you need to get rid of them. I'm always amazed when brilliant assholes are allowed to directly manage customer relations or co-workers.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I’ve had a BA working for me and leading a team. It was one of the highest performing teams I’ve ever had in my org (because everyone was hand-picked/self-selected into that team). It’s not realistic to build teams like this and this team fell apart/could not be sustained when one of the key members eventually left. But they seemed happy and delivered like crazy.
paulddraper 4y ago
Depends if we're talking manager or IC. A competent jerk IC can be put in a corner and be productive. More or less. That said, fire jerks and incompetent people.
agumonkey 4y ago
Minuscule side note: a lot of competent jerk are just immature and fearful young dudes who fall into the "people can respect, accept (maybe even love) me if I'm infallible on that one thing". I was like that, and recently I ran into 20yos who had the exact same psychology.
- candiodari 4y ago
  That's because that works. Many, many people get excluded from social interactions, and have to compensate somehow. Getting excluded from social stuff means lots of time on hand ... which makes competence possible. And again, competence is a necessary precondition. No social skills but competent can work. Whatever you want in terms of social skills but not competent is a 100% guaranteed failure. That doesn't mean competent assholes can't fail, but they don't absolutely have to fail.
Ensorceled 4y ago
> Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up. Until everybody realizes they are working harder to compensate for the dead wood on the team. The first person I ever fired was "incompetent, but nice", one of my team members said "We can always find someone who is nice AND can do the job to replace them" and that stuck with me for a long time.
andrewflnr 4y ago
I think the term "jerk" is underspecified in these types of conversations. The "competent jerks" in the minds of the "pro competent jerk" people are not the same that the "anti competent jerk" people are thinking of. I suspect these groups would agree in many cases on whether to keep someone who is competent but excessively blunt (without malice), and whether to fire someone who is competent but tears down their coworkers with political games. Both of those people might fall under the heading of "jerk", making it too broad a category to base sweeping predetermined choices on.
neotrope 4y ago
A players attract A players, but A players also push out B players if you're tolerating < A players, you might want to take a hard look at yourself.
- nerdix 4y ago
  There are companies that are viable businesses but that can't afford a team of A players.
  - panarky 4y ago
    Quality is free.
    - esafak 4y ago
      No, it's not. How are you defining quality?
  - neotrope 4y ago
    gotta find those that value equity > cash or look at more junior devs also, some businesses don't need A players bc their industry doesn't compete on technology (e.g., real estate dialers).
majormajor 4y ago
"Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability" This is veering into tautological territory but "not competent enough to be useful" is where my personal definition of "incompetent" would land. ;) I also don't want competent jerks but... neither end of this spectrum is good. (IMO the real trick is that neither of these scales (either competence or jerkhood) is universally the same across companies. Different people interact in different ways, and different teams have different problems to solve. Putting up with bad fits on your team for too long hurts your team regardless of the precise sort of bad fit. If you've tried to coach them on what's needed for months on end already with no luck, you have to make a hard decision, and "no action" isn't actually avoiding that decision.)
CuriouslyC 4y ago
The flip side of this is that people will also leave because they get frustrated by having to either clean up after or repeatedly bail out the "incompetent but nice" folks, and will leave for that reason too.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  And if you don't do it cheerfully, day after day, week after week, sacrificing lunches, nights and weekends, missing piano recitals and skipping vacations... you'll become somebody else's anecdote about a "brilliant jerk".
sacnoradhq 4y ago
Robert Sutton wrote a book about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule Edit: Interestingly, depressed people can also bring down team morale.
rqtwteye 4y ago
"Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up." I think incompetent nice people completely destroy team culture. Competent jerks are also a problem but at least they get something done. The IT department at my company used to be full with very nice people that got absolutely nothing done (it's a bit better now). They talked nice, were good at meetings and really good at dinners after work. But at some point deadline pressure kicks in and you realize that you have to do their work if you want to finish. It causes a lot of resentment. Even worse is when nice incompetent people are gatekeepers for something you need (in this case security policies) and block your ability to make decisions. My conclusion is that both nice and incompetent people and competent jerks need to be removed if you want to have a strong team. But if I have to choose I'll take a competent jerk because I can get at least something. Incompetent people are useless.
synergy20 4y ago
a competent jerk is rare, statistically. a nice and incompetent one is common, if anything, they tend to produce more bugs then they can fix. if I'm the boss, I will hire a competent jerk and manage him/her well, instead of feeling good with a few incompetent nice guys while the company will sink, soon or later. the keyword is to survive you have to be competent, other things(nice vs jerk) is secondary, and that's a management's job to "fix", the incompetent-but-nice is nearly impossible to fix to me.
crabbone 4y ago
> I will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk. I won't. I had this dilemma before. And I chose to take incompetent people. My life became miserable. I don't care about people being rude. I feel uncomfortable with people who would like to be rude but can't because they think it's inappropriate or w/e other thing they tell themselves. Somehow, they are more disgusting than people who are open about what they think. Plenty of posters on moderated Web user boards belong to that later category: they'd like to be rude, but try to formally obey the rules of the board and still be rude. Just enough for the moderator not to ban them. Same kind of people who'd delete complaints about their crappy program on a public bug tracker claiming the ticket author violated their code of conduct. --- I don't like to teach. Some people get off on telling juniors what to do. Most those that I saw teaching did it to feel important in their own eyes, beside the eyes of the junior. But when I made the mistake of agreeing to hire incompetent people, the amount of chores increased by a lot in my life. I'm also not the one to force my convictions on those I have to teach, but that led to the "students" making bad choices when it comes to the tools they decided to use. Before they've made their choice, I made it clear that if they chose tools different from those I use, it becomes their problem. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to deal with that problem. And so their productivity was in the negative. They would still be unable to accomplish even very basic tasks, but they would also drag me down by trying to make me solve their problems with the tools I advised against. Instead of just being able to split the work somewhat evenly, I couldn't trust juniors to do things that required independent research -- they felt overwhelmed at such tasks and, if assigned one, would just waste my time by scheduling meetings with me to "discuss" their objectives, where, essentially, they'd expect me to do their work for them and dumb it down so that they could also understand what's being done. I also had to report to my boss on the progress my assigned juniors were making. I felt guilty that they didn't do squat, but at the same time felt like I might become the reason for firing them, and I didn't want to be that person either. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to do stuff like taking over their branch and finishing their task, both because I think that not even the worst programmer deserves that and because, on a personal level, I didn't want to upset them -- after all, they were nice. It's harder to be a jerk to nice people.
- Eisenstein 4y ago
ekianjo 4y ago
You cant have a company full of nice and incompetent people. Useless people can only be allowed in certain numbers.
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I think the key question is whether they are nice, incompetent AND teachable, because if the person can get where you need them with some coaching, then it is not a wasted effort.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Part of 'competence' in a professional work setting has to do with getting along with other people, at least to the minimal extent necessary to get a job done. A 'competent jerk' is incompetent, in other words, at least when it comes to some aspects of the job. If their job requires a lot of communication with other people, then they're definitely grossly incompetent. If their job can be done mostly in isolation, well, they're only minimally incompetent, and maybe that can be brought along, give them a thick-skinned assistant or manager and only have them talk to that person, etc. However, it's probably easier to train people with poor social skills in the art of getting along with others in the workplace, then it is to train those with poor grasp of complex technologies to understand them, let alone in resolving difficult bugs or finding creative solutions to novel problems.
not_the_fda 4y ago
At the end of the day the nice incompetent kills morale. You can only carry water for someone so much. We all have our own work to do, fixing Jimmy's fuckups gets real old real quick, no matter how nice they are. You need to cut the nice incompetents or the competents are going to leave to work with other competents.
megablast 4y ago
Yes, having someone nice who constantly screws up, messes up public pages, deletes data, delays releases for months with dumb mistakes. What a genius decision.
csomar 4y ago
Didn't work where I worked/lived/experienced. There is no incompetent nice. They are usually "nice" but they end up wasting significant time as they try to "show off their work". There is also no competent jerk. There is bad management. Not everyone wants to train juniors or deal with them on a daily basis. There is also a set of people who wouldn't mind telling snarky comments to each other; and another set of people sensitive to any gesture you make. Put every set separate from the other. tl;dr; There is only competent nice and incompetent jerk. Otherwise, it's a management failure.
dmn322 4y ago
I dunno, what if we considered that competent jerks could be put on an improvement plan as well? Some people come off as jerks because they're unaware, not ill-intentioned. Even straight up racists etc. can mostly learn and would be more than willing to given a real opportunity without constant judgement and shaming. If not being a jerk is such an important part of performance, maybe more company resources can be put into mental health, etc... just as training on the job skills is seen as an investment, so could that. It's funny/strange/interesting how social skills are something that you're constantly judged on yet there are very few resources to help people with. Needing help with it is treated as more shameful than needing help with the technical aspects... at least the technical aspects were at some point explicitly taught to people! There are some just straight up incorrigible narcissists and psychopaths, but there aren't that many, and TBH, they usually tend to have some of the best social skills... probably they're upper management already.
gofreddygo 4y ago
> will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk. Not that simple. On an easy going project, deadlines far enough, work well defined, people know their parts, yeah you'd like a nice person on the team to have lunch with and share cat videos. In a project with your ass on the line, real $$$ at stake, you presenting progress to management every week for a visible real promotion path, I'd bet you want a competent person regardless of how foul the language or body odor. Niceness just doesn't matter. the $hit gets real when you find out, said competent person is just an imposter. But there is a sweet spot though, keep the competence high, and turn the niceness knob high and low as convenient. At work, being nice is just an act after all. People can and will see through the act, but they themselves are guilty too, you're not offending anyone
tasuki 4y ago
> Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up. Hard disagree. They demotivate the competent. People start to wonder if they can perhaps slack off and be nice instead of delivering...
CM30 4y ago
Yeah, I'd agree with this. Of course, both the 'brilliant jerk' and 'incompetent but nice' folks are a liability in the long run (they both drive away genuinely nice, talented contributors), but the jerk tends to drive them away more quickly, and they also tend to discourage less competent people from getting better at their job too. And that eventually leads a team or group to stagnate. The only people who will stick around are either jerks themselves, or generally lack a back bone.

etempleton 4y ago

Follow up: I have seen a mass exodus of a high performance team because of a single competent jerk that was allowed to wreck havoc. I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver. I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.

fvdessen 4y ago
Worst case scenario that i've seen with 'incompetent nice' is when somehow a team was composed of only such people. Nothing they made worked, but because they were all nice it couldn't really be admitted that it was because of their incompetence, so other competent people were pulled in to help, but then under incompetent leadership, so they were rendered ineffective.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > but then under incompetent leadership, so they were rendered ineffective This made me realise that I'm pretty tolerant of incompetence so long as it's junior to me (where I can help them improve). But make me work for somebody incompetent and I will call them out on it, escalate it to their manager if need be, and leave pretty quickly if the situation isn't remedied.
- userbinator 4y ago
  You pretty much described most of Big Tech.
Jensson 4y ago
> I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging. They tend to climb management chain and then you are left with leaders who can't understand anything, that is by far worse than what any competent jerk can accomplish.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  A know-nothing hands-on manager is a real headache, but a hands-off one may just let a team do their own thing?
  - Jensson 4y ago
    That can work short term if the team is still full of competent people, but wont work long term since the manager is in charge of hiring, firing and promoting people.
- fzeroracer 4y ago
  Is it? What happens when you need feature XYZ, and the competent jerk puts down their foot and says the system can't support said feature because of the way he drove the team to design it? Then you're left with a dilemma where you either lose your talent or lose the feature. This kind of thing was something I saw when I did contract work because said competent jerks knew they could get their way.
paulddraper 4y ago
The WORST damage can be caused in socialization not performance. But the most common damage is done by performance not in socialization.
theamk 4y ago
I've seen multiple competent people quit the team, citing overwork and team's inability to deliver results. The reason that more than half of the team were "incompetent but nice". They'd take weeks to do what other team members would do in days, and would require a lot of support too. But they'd still take headcount spots, so the team could not hire more people without firing someone first, and everyone was so nice....
neotrope 4y ago
> I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging. bullshit. how many incidents are due to incompetence? how many alerts were just forgotten? how many customers churn because of low quality ux? how many additional incompetent employees were hired because your nice friend let them through? incompetence erodes culture, leads to bureaucracy and the slow death of a company.
manicennui 4y ago
Masses of incompetent people are the very reason why dealing with most large companies and their products and services is such a nightmare.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  I think there is a simpler explanation: nobody knows how to run a large organization. Large organizations are effectively superintelligences, but extremely dysfunctional ones. As soon as someone figures out how to share information and coordinate work in a large group of people, we will get our technological singularity. Even without any AI.
arp242 4y ago
I left because of "incompetent nice" people as I was tired of the never-ending torrent of incompetent nonsense I had to deal with and I felt the end-product just wasn't very good or something I was proud of. "Jerk" is really too rough of a classifier; someone who communicates a bit like a jerk but is fundamentally well-meaning is someone I can work with; if you have a daily working relationship you can learn to just read over the snark or whatever. Someone who insists on their view being forced through and will bully, insult, or use other tactics to do so is something I have a lot more problems with, as are the "this is the one true correct way and if you don't see my brilliance then you are most likely mentally retarded and should visit a hospital for an examination" type of people.
jahewson 4y ago
I’ve seen “incompetent but nice” people destroy entire companies, as in those companies no longer exist.
midoridensha 4y ago
>I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver. This sounds like many American police departments.

Kranar 4y ago

I used to think the same way as you, and then I started a company and had to pay out of pocket for employees, and the sad truth that I almost hate myself for admitting is that if you have to pick between incompetent but nice, and competent but a jerk, you take the jerk. And yes, multiple people will even quit because you picked the jerk over the nice guy, and I still found it's worth it to take the jerk because of how competency scales. A good/competent software engineer can genuinely do the work of many, many mediocre developers and you're almost always better off with a small number of really solid developers over a large number of nice but mediocre ones. Now of course we can always exaggerate things to an extreme and compare a racist, sexist, jerk who swears nonstop, to someone who is mildly incompetent, and there are certain principles and boundaries that are worth upholding with respect to how people treat each other regardless of their productivity, but in actuality that's not really the difficult choice you end up facing. The really difficult choice you end up facing is someone who is nice and gets along with people but is ultimately too dependent on others to do their job versus someone who works independently and does an excellent job but is very blunt and can be an asshole in regards to the expectations they hold others to. Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight. And finally, I have observed that in the long run, competent people tend to prefer to work with others whose skill they respect and they feel they can learn from because they're really good at their job, compared to working with someone who is pleasant but is always dependent on others. Being nice is a good short term skill to have, but people get used to those who are nice but they never get used to someone who is incompetent.

lisasays 4y ago
Good software developers often expect their peers to also be at a high standard and will speak in very plain, rude, and blunt language if they feel others are not pulling their weight. Speaking bluntly isn't what is meant by being an asshole/jerk. What we're talking about here is the completely gratuitous, "I'm so valuable here that I can get away with it" abusive behavior that has no correlation with performative ability.
- Kranar 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago

I think incompetent but nice can also lead to morale problems. Not as bad as the jerk situation, but eventually everyone notices this one person who does no work but is still getting paid. Which can lead to jealously and feelings of unfairness.

onos 4y ago
It gets worse when they become the norm. Then the rockstars start to think “why am I doing the work for five people but getting paid only 20% more” then they leave.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  It is more like why do I have five people who boss me around in addition to my real boss?
etempleton 4y ago
It is a balancing act for sure.
denton-scratch 4y ago
"Doing no work" would be great. Understanding the commit they made last thing on Friday, which is incomprehensible and has broken your work, is not so great. In my last job, I worked with three incompetents, none of whom were jerks, in a team of ten. I reckon the rest of us had to do twice the work to navigate their mistakes. This is the "Please stop writing code" syndrome.

rukuu001 4y ago

One of the few very real regrets I have about the way we've run our business is not getting rid of a brilliant asshole sooner. It was boggling: a) How good he was. Just like really really good quality of work. b) How bad he was. Crying client. Regularly destroying team morale and productivity with incredible drama.

Ensorceled 4y ago
> One of the few very real regrets I have about the way we've run our business is not getting rid of a brilliant asshole sooner. If you can't isolate the brilliant asshole in a back office somewhere, you need to get rid of them. I'm always amazed when brilliant assholes are allowed to directly manage customer relations or co-workers.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I’ve had a BA working for me and leading a team. It was one of the highest performing teams I’ve ever had in my org (because everyone was hand-picked/self-selected into that team). It’s not realistic to build teams like this and this team fell apart/could not be sustained when one of the key members eventually left. But they seemed happy and delivered like crazy.

paulddraper 4y ago

Depends if we're talking manager or IC. A competent jerk IC can be put in a corner and be productive. More or less. That said, fire jerks and incompetent people.

agumonkey 4y ago

Minuscule side note: a lot of competent jerk are just immature and fearful young dudes who fall into the "people can respect, accept (maybe even love) me if I'm infallible on that one thing". I was like that, and recently I ran into 20yos who had the exact same psychology.

candiodari 4y ago
That's because that works. Many, many people get excluded from social interactions, and have to compensate somehow. Getting excluded from social stuff means lots of time on hand ... which makes competence possible. And again, competence is a necessary precondition. No social skills but competent can work. Whatever you want in terms of social skills but not competent is a 100% guaranteed failure. That doesn't mean competent assholes can't fail, but they don't absolutely have to fail.

Ensorceled 4y ago

> Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up. Until everybody realizes they are working harder to compensate for the dead wood on the team. The first person I ever fired was "incompetent, but nice", one of my team members said "We can always find someone who is nice AND can do the job to replace them" and that stuck with me for a long time.

andrewflnr 4y ago

I think the term "jerk" is underspecified in these types of conversations. The "competent jerks" in the minds of the "pro competent jerk" people are not the same that the "anti competent jerk" people are thinking of. I suspect these groups would agree in many cases on whether to keep someone who is competent but excessively blunt (without malice), and whether to fire someone who is competent but tears down their coworkers with political games. Both of those people might fall under the heading of "jerk", making it too broad a category to base sweeping predetermined choices on.

neotrope 4y ago

A players attract A players, but A players also push out B players if you're tolerating < A players, you might want to take a hard look at yourself.

nerdix 4y ago
There are companies that are viable businesses but that can't afford a team of A players.
- panarky 4y ago
  Quality is free.
  - esafak 4y ago
    No, it's not. How are you defining quality?
- neotrope 4y ago
  gotta find those that value equity > cash or look at more junior devs also, some businesses don't need A players bc their industry doesn't compete on technology (e.g., real estate dialers).

majormajor 4y ago

"Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability" This is veering into tautological territory but "not competent enough to be useful" is where my personal definition of "incompetent" would land. ;) I also don't want competent jerks but... neither end of this spectrum is good. (IMO the real trick is that neither of these scales (either competence or jerkhood) is universally the same across companies. Different people interact in different ways, and different teams have different problems to solve. Putting up with bad fits on your team for too long hurts your team regardless of the precise sort of bad fit. If you've tried to coach them on what's needed for months on end already with no luck, you have to make a hard decision, and "no action" isn't actually avoiding that decision.)

CuriouslyC 4y ago

The flip side of this is that people will also leave because they get frustrated by having to either clean up after or repeatedly bail out the "incompetent but nice" folks, and will leave for that reason too.

commandlinefan 4y ago
And if you don't do it cheerfully, day after day, week after week, sacrificing lunches, nights and weekends, missing piano recitals and skipping vacations... you'll become somebody else's anecdote about a "brilliant jerk".

sacnoradhq 4y ago

Robert Sutton wrote a book about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule Edit: Interestingly, depressed people can also bring down team morale.

rqtwteye 4y ago

"Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up." I think incompetent nice people completely destroy team culture. Competent jerks are also a problem but at least they get something done. The IT department at my company used to be full with very nice people that got absolutely nothing done (it's a bit better now). They talked nice, were good at meetings and really good at dinners after work. But at some point deadline pressure kicks in and you realize that you have to do their work if you want to finish. It causes a lot of resentment. Even worse is when nice incompetent people are gatekeepers for something you need (in this case security policies) and block your ability to make decisions. My conclusion is that both nice and incompetent people and competent jerks need to be removed if you want to have a strong team. But if I have to choose I'll take a competent jerk because I can get at least something. Incompetent people are useless.

synergy20 4y ago

a competent jerk is rare, statistically. a nice and incompetent one is common, if anything, they tend to produce more bugs then they can fix. if I'm the boss, I will hire a competent jerk and manage him/her well, instead of feeling good with a few incompetent nice guys while the company will sink, soon or later. the keyword is to survive you have to be competent, other things(nice vs jerk) is secondary, and that's a management's job to "fix", the incompetent-but-nice is nearly impossible to fix to me.

crabbone 4y ago

> I will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk. I won't. I had this dilemma before. And I chose to take incompetent people. My life became miserable. I don't care about people being rude. I feel uncomfortable with people who would like to be rude but can't because they think it's inappropriate or w/e other thing they tell themselves. Somehow, they are more disgusting than people who are open about what they think. Plenty of posters on moderated Web user boards belong to that later category: they'd like to be rude, but try to formally obey the rules of the board and still be rude. Just enough for the moderator not to ban them. Same kind of people who'd delete complaints about their crappy program on a public bug tracker claiming the ticket author violated their code of conduct. --- I don't like to teach. Some people get off on telling juniors what to do. Most those that I saw teaching did it to feel important in their own eyes, beside the eyes of the junior. But when I made the mistake of agreeing to hire incompetent people, the amount of chores increased by a lot in my life. I'm also not the one to force my convictions on those I have to teach, but that led to the "students" making bad choices when it comes to the tools they decided to use. Before they've made their choice, I made it clear that if they chose tools different from those I use, it becomes their problem. Unfortunately, they wouldn't be able to deal with that problem. And so their productivity was in the negative. They would still be unable to accomplish even very basic tasks, but they would also drag me down by trying to make me solve their problems with the tools I advised against. Instead of just being able to split the work somewhat evenly, I couldn't trust juniors to do things that required independent research -- they felt overwhelmed at such tasks and, if assigned one, would just waste my time by scheduling meetings with me to "discuss" their objectives, where, essentially, they'd expect me to do their work for them and dumb it down so that they could also understand what's being done. I also had to report to my boss on the progress my assigned juniors were making. I felt guilty that they didn't do squat, but at the same time felt like I might become the reason for firing them, and I didn't want to be that person either. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to do stuff like taking over their branch and finishing their task, both because I think that not even the worst programmer deserves that and because, on a personal level, I didn't want to upset them -- after all, they were nice. It's harder to be a jerk to nice people.

Eisenstein 4y ago

ekianjo 4y ago

You cant have a company full of nice and incompetent people. Useless people can only be allowed in certain numbers.

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I think the key question is whether they are nice, incompetent AND teachable, because if the person can get where you need them with some coaching, then it is not a wasted effort.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Part of 'competence' in a professional work setting has to do with getting along with other people, at least to the minimal extent necessary to get a job done. A 'competent jerk' is incompetent, in other words, at least when it comes to some aspects of the job. If their job requires a lot of communication with other people, then they're definitely grossly incompetent. If their job can be done mostly in isolation, well, they're only minimally incompetent, and maybe that can be brought along, give them a thick-skinned assistant or manager and only have them talk to that person, etc. However, it's probably easier to train people with poor social skills in the art of getting along with others in the workplace, then it is to train those with poor grasp of complex technologies to understand them, let alone in resolving difficult bugs or finding creative solutions to novel problems.

not_the_fda 4y ago

At the end of the day the nice incompetent kills morale. You can only carry water for someone so much. We all have our own work to do, fixing Jimmy's fuckups gets real old real quick, no matter how nice they are. You need to cut the nice incompetents or the competents are going to leave to work with other competents.

megablast 4y ago

Yes, having someone nice who constantly screws up, messes up public pages, deletes data, delays releases for months with dumb mistakes. What a genius decision.

csomar 4y ago

Didn't work where I worked/lived/experienced. There is no incompetent nice. They are usually "nice" but they end up wasting significant time as they try to "show off their work". There is also no competent jerk. There is bad management. Not everyone wants to train juniors or deal with them on a daily basis. There is also a set of people who wouldn't mind telling snarky comments to each other; and another set of people sensitive to any gesture you make. Put every set separate from the other. tl;dr; There is only competent nice and incompetent jerk. Otherwise, it's a management failure.

dmn322 4y ago

I dunno, what if we considered that competent jerks could be put on an improvement plan as well? Some people come off as jerks because they're unaware, not ill-intentioned. Even straight up racists etc. can mostly learn and would be more than willing to given a real opportunity without constant judgement and shaming. If not being a jerk is such an important part of performance, maybe more company resources can be put into mental health, etc... just as training on the job skills is seen as an investment, so could that. It's funny/strange/interesting how social skills are something that you're constantly judged on yet there are very few resources to help people with. Needing help with it is treated as more shameful than needing help with the technical aspects... at least the technical aspects were at some point explicitly taught to people! There are some just straight up incorrigible narcissists and psychopaths, but there aren't that many, and TBH, they usually tend to have some of the best social skills... probably they're upper management already.

gofreddygo 4y ago

> will take someone nice and incompetent every day of the week over a competent jerk. Not that simple. On an easy going project, deadlines far enough, work well defined, people know their parts, yeah you'd like a nice person on the team to have lunch with and share cat videos. In a project with your ass on the line, real $$$ at stake, you presenting progress to management every week for a visible real promotion path, I'd bet you want a competent person regardless of how foul the language or body odor. Niceness just doesn't matter. the $hit gets real when you find out, said competent person is just an imposter. But there is a sweet spot though, keep the competence high, and turn the niceness knob high and low as convenient. At work, being nice is just an act after all. People can and will see through the act, but they themselves are guilty too, you're not offending anyone

tasuki 4y ago

> Incompetent nice people, as long as they are not so incompetent to be a liability can at least contribute to a strong team culture and make good competent people want to show up. Hard disagree. They demotivate the competent. People start to wonder if they can perhaps slack off and be nice instead of delivering...

CM30 4y ago

Yeah, I'd agree with this. Of course, both the 'brilliant jerk' and 'incompetent but nice' folks are a liability in the long run (they both drive away genuinely nice, talented contributors), but the jerk tends to drive them away more quickly, and they also tend to discourage less competent people from getting better at their job too. And that eventually leads a team or group to stagnate. The only people who will stick around are either jerks themselves, or generally lack a back bone.