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The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when

The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burned.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
Yep. Just because you're a Weird Nerd who's good at something, the world doesn't owe you respect and friendship unless you're willing to do the same.
- p_l 2y ago
  Beware though that the inverse is also true. No matter if one is "weird nerd" or not
- glitchc 2y ago
  You conflate two things that are actually quite different. You don't need to be friends with the Weird Nerd, but you do absolutely have to respect their expertise in the subject matter, especially when it exceeds yours. It's in your employer's interest to do so. Not doing so means you're being less than professional and might secretly be jealous of this person for having attained a higher level of technical achievement than your own.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    Respect for your knowledge, yes - but if you're the world's top expert in Subject X, while simultaneously world-renowned for being an unpleasant asshole, don't expect people to interact with you more than the absolute bare minimum required to do the job. And frankly, nobody's irreplaceable. If you're #1 in the world, but casually drop racist and sexist slurs, odds are that the #2 expert in the world isn't that much worse than you, nor #3..#10.
    - glitchc 2y ago
      And that's fine for most weird nerds. Being cordial and respecting of knowledge is all that's needed in the workplace. Most wns wouldn't make good friendship material either. Their opinions and tastes have a wide range from normal to rather eclectic. But without these people you will never be able to deliver the next new search paradigm. That's how they bring value and that's why the employer hires them. They also tend to be the ones that work very long hours, tinkering with stuff because it's "fun." Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
      - pavel_lishin 2y ago
        > Being cordial and respecting of knowledge is all that's needed in the workplace. Yes - but a lot of Weird Nerds aren't willing to be cordial. I said in another comment that I think that one of the reasons they find their home online is because online, others can walk away from their comments when they need a break from them; something that's much harder to do at work, when you're face to face with them in a meeting, or at the watercooler, or in the bathroom where they followed you to continue their argument. > Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking. I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
        glitchc 2y ago
        When someone is not willing to be cordial, you don't have to be cordial in return. > I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of". I don't think we're disagreeing. Certainly the way we're molded in our formative years is hard to break out of. That wns tend to be freethinkers is also true, after all their differences in thinking are what set them apart from regular members of society. I'm positing that freethinkers have a much better chance of breaking the mold than regular people. I'm not sure of your tone in this conversation though. Are you perhaps uncomfortable with individuals who think differently from you? That is often the root of intolerance my friend.
Michelangelo11 2y ago
What exactly was the issue, and did they burn people on purpose or through some kind of extreme carelessness and indifference?
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Many weird nerds are on the spectrum and require very good people managers above them to mitigate their quirks, and should never go into people management themselves. The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no one can get along.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest. But the team ultimately has to cohere in order to deliver. That's really the core job of a manager: to create an environment where people can work together meaningfully and direct it to productive ends.
  - alexvitkov 2y ago
    > Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU... Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
  - greatpostman 2y ago
    This isn’t true, most of the best software is written by individuals. Even inside large tech companies, it still happens that major value is created by one person.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    I totally empathize with this, but there are hardly many people managers who can pull that off. And often those that can get promoted up quickly so that they aren’t managing teams directly anymore. It is much easier to produce with mediocre people managers with a team of socially well adjusted mediocre programmers, than a unicorn people manager with a diverse team of highly skilled programmers who aren’t necessarily great at social skills. Individual efforts are completely different. A programmer like Notch can produce Minecraft on his own and then just get help to push it into a maintained product. This happens all the time, but you can’t produce that easily (and definitely not consistently) at the big corp level.
idiotsecant 2y ago
Yes, the weird nerd is rarely a good people manager. As useful as they might be as an individual contributor when property channeled, they can easily be a -10x contributor when you put them in charge of people.
- doug_durham 2y ago
  I disagree. A "weird nerd" is much better in leadership than a socially adept careerist to parachutes in to get a bump on their resume. To build good products you need to care. A "weird nerd" is more likely to care.
  - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    It would help your point to separate design leadership from supervisory management. You do not want weird nerds in charge of personnel decisions beyond "Yes, we get along" and "No, we don't"; you do want them in decision-making roles about the product.
  - wnc3141 2y ago
    care, yes but caring about the right things in product is a process of discipline and organizational/ market knowledge. Its not hard to imagine pursuing the most interesting qualities at the cost of core functionality. (hypothetical - such as insisting that the buttons on my cable box have the touch of a mechanical keyboard) edit: to be fair, it is extremely necessary to have both voices at the table challenging one another
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
The author bemoans that any org that is not sufficiently pro-weird-nerd becomes anti-weird-nerd, and in conjunction with this comment which laments the experience of working under one alongside my own experiences of similar, I think it's worth remarking that many Weird Nerds not only do not foster social skills of any sort, but in fact view this as a badge of honor, as "proof" of their weirdness, and just, I'm over that shit. I love weird nerds, I love the sort of people who obsess about things, who work on them as obsessively as I do, I love info dumps, I love people who are passionate even about bizarre, niche shit I don't care about (actually, I love them even more for it!) but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you. And I fully accept that autism runs through this pack of people like a freight train, and that's fair, I am always down to provide accommodations, I will talk to people how they need to be talked to, I will bend the norms of social interaction so it's more palatable, all of that, zero issues whatsoever. But even with that in consideration, relationships of all kinds are a give and take, and if all you do is take, people will notice, and people will avoid you.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  > but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you. You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits lol no they don't it's just that they exhibit more of group-thinking and less individualism, so they provoke less situations that might potentially cause conflict. My experience with nerds is "ok each has their own opinion this is going to be difficult but let's try cooperating" whereas non-nerds act exclusively "my way or the highway" because they have never previously encountered the idea that their view of the world might be wrong "because I'm the majority".
  - 2y ago
icodemuch 2y ago
I read the article as acknowledging this pressure by arguing that Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions. Without the workplace pressure on Weird Nerds to become people managers, would they still manage people? Maybe not. I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that they never need to become managers, if they don’t want.
- Yossarrian22 2y ago
  Even if you’re not doing performance reviews there’s still a need for directing people technically when the work exceeds what one person(even a 10xer(if such a thing really exists), and that’s where you need some minimum amount of EQ
  - pixl97 2y ago
    I mean it really depends where the weird nerd is. I mean I can say I'm on the border of weird nerd myself, though I say I have enough EQ to get around. Never want to manage people, and have a "high enough" position for myself. The company I work for is in the middle of a new software project and just a few months in I layed out a document stating how and where the software was going to hit failure points that were going to cause outages/degradations of service. Nine months later those failures started occurring like dominoes. We had to stop on new deliveries and work on performance for months. I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.
  - omoikane 2y ago
    I think the contention is that playing political games, as quoted in the article, is beyond the minimum amount of EQ normally expected for a non-management role. Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.
koolala 2y ago
i had to be in a confinement center designed by a nerd who put a computer where it shouldn't belong, im sorry thank you for sharing your story
- koolala 2y ago
  im sorry
  - koolala 2y ago
    its ok <3
    - koolala 2y ago
      really... ty <3
      - koolala 2y ago
        E>
neilv 2y ago
> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd). Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd. And none of them appeared to be geniuses. Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common attribute, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.) Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.
Aurornis 2y ago
The author sidesteps the problem entirely by picking the most idealistic Weird Nerd possible: A person who is indisputably talented, accomplished, perseverant, and even benevolently forgives those who wronged her in the past. In the real world, the "Weird Nerd" rarely checks all of these boxes, let alone most of them. I bet a lot of people will read this and identify as the Weird Nerd despite checking none of the boxes. That's the nature of articles that leave out the nuance and instead give us the most idealized view of a noble scientist who was a victim of the system. It leaves an opening for everyone to feel like they were a victim of the system. That's why this problem is far more complicated than articles like this would lead you to believe. Many of the "Weird Nerd" people out there aren't perfect scientists or engineers unfairly shunned by the system. Many of them have real flaws of varying degrees that would require a lot of guidance and mentoring even within a perfect system. And it's not easy! In fact, it can be very taxing on teams to work around the quirks of your average (non Noble Prize winning, like this article) Weird Nerd even if they can produce good output, which is why so many companies select for Boring Nerds instead.
bjornsing 2y ago
> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burned. And in what way is Katalin Karikó responsible for your mistreatment? I doubt you would have said something similar about a black or gay former manager, attributing your mistreatment to their race or sexual orientation. But for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to attribute it to a Weird Nerd personality.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hot_gril 2y ago
There's really no such thing as "working with computers" (as is often said), because every piece of tech was made by and for humans, so social skills always matter. The hardest projects I've succeeded at depended on looking at things that way, even purely technical solo ones.

pavel_lishin 2y ago

Yep. Just because you're a Weird Nerd who's good at something, the world doesn't owe you respect and friendship unless you're willing to do the same.

p_l 2y ago
Beware though that the inverse is also true. No matter if one is "weird nerd" or not
glitchc 2y ago
You conflate two things that are actually quite different. You don't need to be friends with the Weird Nerd, but you do absolutely have to respect their expertise in the subject matter, especially when it exceeds yours. It's in your employer's interest to do so. Not doing so means you're being less than professional and might secretly be jealous of this person for having attained a higher level of technical achievement than your own.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  Respect for your knowledge, yes - but if you're the world's top expert in Subject X, while simultaneously world-renowned for being an unpleasant asshole, don't expect people to interact with you more than the absolute bare minimum required to do the job. And frankly, nobody's irreplaceable. If you're #1 in the world, but casually drop racist and sexist slurs, odds are that the #2 expert in the world isn't that much worse than you, nor #3..#10.
  - glitchc 2y ago
    And that's fine for most weird nerds. Being cordial and respecting of knowledge is all that's needed in the workplace. Most wns wouldn't make good friendship material either. Their opinions and tastes have a wide range from normal to rather eclectic. But without these people you will never be able to deliver the next new search paradigm. That's how they bring value and that's why the employer hires them. They also tend to be the ones that work very long hours, tinkering with stuff because it's "fun." Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      > Being cordial and respecting of knowledge is all that's needed in the workplace. Yes - but a lot of Weird Nerds aren't willing to be cordial. I said in another comment that I think that one of the reasons they find their home online is because online, others can walk away from their comments when they need a break from them; something that's much harder to do at work, when you're face to face with them in a meeting, or at the watercooler, or in the bathroom where they followed you to continue their argument. > Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking. I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
      - glitchc 2y ago
        When someone is not willing to be cordial, you don't have to be cordial in return. > I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of". I don't think we're disagreeing. Certainly the way we're molded in our formative years is hard to break out of. That wns tend to be freethinkers is also true, after all their differences in thinking are what set them apart from regular members of society. I'm positing that freethinkers have a much better chance of breaking the mold than regular people. I'm not sure of your tone in this conversation though. Are you perhaps uncomfortable with individuals who think differently from you? That is often the root of intolerance my friend.

Michelangelo11 2y ago

What exactly was the issue, and did they burn people on purpose or through some kind of extreme carelessness and indifference?

seanmcdirmid 2y ago

Many weird nerds are on the spectrum and require very good people managers above them to mitigate their quirks, and should never go into people management themselves. The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no one can get along.

the_snooze 2y ago
Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest. But the team ultimately has to cohere in order to deliver. That's really the core job of a manager: to create an environment where people can work together meaningfully and direct it to productive ends.
- alexvitkov 2y ago
  > Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU... Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
- greatpostman 2y ago
  This isn’t true, most of the best software is written by individuals. Even inside large tech companies, it still happens that major value is created by one person.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  I totally empathize with this, but there are hardly many people managers who can pull that off. And often those that can get promoted up quickly so that they aren’t managing teams directly anymore. It is much easier to produce with mediocre people managers with a team of socially well adjusted mediocre programmers, than a unicorn people manager with a diverse team of highly skilled programmers who aren’t necessarily great at social skills. Individual efforts are completely different. A programmer like Notch can produce Minecraft on his own and then just get help to push it into a maintained product. This happens all the time, but you can’t produce that easily (and definitely not consistently) at the big corp level.

idiotsecant 2y ago

Yes, the weird nerd is rarely a good people manager. As useful as they might be as an individual contributor when property channeled, they can easily be a -10x contributor when you put them in charge of people.

doug_durham 2y ago
I disagree. A "weird nerd" is much better in leadership than a socially adept careerist to parachutes in to get a bump on their resume. To build good products you need to care. A "weird nerd" is more likely to care.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  It would help your point to separate design leadership from supervisory management. You do not want weird nerds in charge of personnel decisions beyond "Yes, we get along" and "No, we don't"; you do want them in decision-making roles about the product.
- wnc3141 2y ago
  care, yes but caring about the right things in product is a process of discipline and organizational/ market knowledge. Its not hard to imagine pursuing the most interesting qualities at the cost of core functionality. (hypothetical - such as insisting that the buttons on my cable box have the touch of a mechanical keyboard) edit: to be fair, it is extremely necessary to have both voices at the table challenging one another

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

The author bemoans that any org that is not sufficiently pro-weird-nerd becomes anti-weird-nerd, and in conjunction with this comment which laments the experience of working under one alongside my own experiences of similar, I think it's worth remarking that many Weird Nerds not only do not foster social skills of any sort, but in fact view this as a badge of honor, as "proof" of their weirdness, and just, I'm over that shit. I love weird nerds, I love the sort of people who obsess about things, who work on them as obsessively as I do, I love info dumps, I love people who are passionate even about bizarre, niche shit I don't care about (actually, I love them even more for it!) but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you. And I fully accept that autism runs through this pack of people like a freight train, and that's fair, I am always down to provide accommodations, I will talk to people how they need to be talked to, I will bend the norms of social interaction so it's more palatable, all of that, zero issues whatsoever. But even with that in consideration, relationships of all kinds are a give and take, and if all you do is take, people will notice, and people will avoid you.

anal_reactor 2y ago
> but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you. You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits lol no they don't it's just that they exhibit more of group-thinking and less individualism, so they provoke less situations that might potentially cause conflict. My experience with nerds is "ok each has their own opinion this is going to be difficult but let's try cooperating" whereas non-nerds act exclusively "my way or the highway" because they have never previously encountered the idea that their view of the world might be wrong "because I'm the majority".
- 2y ago

icodemuch 2y ago

I read the article as acknowledging this pressure by arguing that Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions. Without the workplace pressure on Weird Nerds to become people managers, would they still manage people? Maybe not. I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that they never need to become managers, if they don’t want.

Yossarrian22 2y ago
Even if you’re not doing performance reviews there’s still a need for directing people technically when the work exceeds what one person(even a 10xer(if such a thing really exists), and that’s where you need some minimum amount of EQ
- pixl97 2y ago
  I mean it really depends where the weird nerd is. I mean I can say I'm on the border of weird nerd myself, though I say I have enough EQ to get around. Never want to manage people, and have a "high enough" position for myself. The company I work for is in the middle of a new software project and just a few months in I layed out a document stating how and where the software was going to hit failure points that were going to cause outages/degradations of service. Nine months later those failures started occurring like dominoes. We had to stop on new deliveries and work on performance for months. I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.
- omoikane 2y ago
  I think the contention is that playing political games, as quoted in the article, is beyond the minimum amount of EQ normally expected for a non-management role. Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.

koolala 2y ago

i had to be in a confinement center designed by a nerd who put a computer where it shouldn't belong, im sorry thank you for sharing your story

koolala 2y ago
im sorry
- koolala 2y ago
  its ok <3
  - koolala 2y ago
    really... ty <3
    - koolala 2y ago
      E>

neilv 2y ago

> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd). Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd. And none of them appeared to be geniuses. Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common attribute, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.) Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.

Aurornis 2y ago

The author sidesteps the problem entirely by picking the most idealistic Weird Nerd possible: A person who is indisputably talented, accomplished, perseverant, and even benevolently forgives those who wronged her in the past. In the real world, the "Weird Nerd" rarely checks all of these boxes, let alone most of them. I bet a lot of people will read this and identify as the Weird Nerd despite checking none of the boxes. That's the nature of articles that leave out the nuance and instead give us the most idealized view of a noble scientist who was a victim of the system. It leaves an opening for everyone to feel like they were a victim of the system. That's why this problem is far more complicated than articles like this would lead you to believe. Many of the "Weird Nerd" people out there aren't perfect scientists or engineers unfairly shunned by the system. Many of them have real flaws of varying degrees that would require a lot of guidance and mentoring even within a perfect system. And it's not easy! In fact, it can be very taxing on teams to work around the quirks of your average (non Noble Prize winning, like this article) Weird Nerd even if they can produce good output, which is why so many companies select for Boring Nerds instead.

bjornsing 2y ago

> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burned. And in what way is Katalin Karikó responsible for your mistreatment? I doubt you would have said something similar about a black or gay former manager, attributing your mistreatment to their race or sexual orientation. But for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to attribute it to a Weird Nerd personality.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hot_gril 2y ago

There's really no such thing as "working with computers" (as is often said), because every piece of tech was made by and for humans, so social skills always matter. The hardest projects I've succeeded at depended on looking at things that way, even purely technical solo ones.