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However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much mor

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation. Your next paragraph gives advice to the weird nerds, but this is practically a genre. What I haven’t seen much of is advice to an organization about how to deal with what you’re pointing out here. You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?

cbozeman 2y ago
"You're out of your depth." That's what you do. A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. Intelligence allows someone to gain that insight faster than those in the middle of the bell curve of IQ, but it doesn't magically confer it. It still takes time, reading, research, and seeing it in practice. Or put another way - what I call the "Iceberg Analogy" - every discipline in life is like an iceberg. The average person sees about 10% of what's actually happening, and is able to comprehend that without too much effort, but the other 90% that's below the surface takes a lot to fully make sense of.
- antisthenes 2y ago
  > A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. When you talk to people, you have no idea how much time they've spent before that conversation gaining insight. Maybe their simple phrase is a culmination of several years of research and insight, whereas for you, you just thought about this topic yesterday. Seems like normies need to be reminded of that way more frequently than nerds.
- mmcgaha 2y ago
  A better response would be to tell them you are done trying to convince them because you own the responsibility and consequences of the decision. "You're out of your depth" is an insult and is intended to be one.
  - bruce343434 2y ago
    Is saying that someone has no expertise in a subject necessarily an insult? To me, your proposal sounds more like a band-aid, instead of treating the core ailment: someone who won't recognize their own fallibility. Perhaps it can't be "treated", and we just have to make do with such "band aids". But wouldn't it be more productive if we could just get to the root of it?
  - cbozeman 2y ago
    "You're out of your depth" is an insult to someone with an excessive ego. If you're not actually out of your depth, you won't be insulted by it. I don't get insulted when someone says I'm stupid. Because that is not true, and I know it isn't true. It isn't the things we know to be untrue that insults us - it's the things that we know to be true, that we can't accept - or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us.
    - xenocratus 2y ago
      > or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us Isn't this the point of the previous comment? That the WN thinks they're not out of their depth and can't see that about themselves. So it is an insult from that perspective.
- bsder 2y ago
  > "You're out of your depth." Except most of the time ... they are not. Most non-junior WNs learn to have significant respect for those doing the work. The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions. Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled. And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else. The WN can see that you are rewarding the politician rather than the person who actually did the work. The WN will actually calculate the full cap table and see the distortion that flags the insider backscratching. The WN can envision exactly how the sales incentives will be exploited. etc. Effectively, the WN is a canary that detects bad managers immediately unlike normal people. And that's something that bad managers simply cannot abide.
  - lazyasciiart 2y ago
    I have been in a meeting where the weird nerd is saying "our company should completely ditch customer support phone lines and only use a chat service because I don't know anyone who wants to make a phone call". This company was a utility that had customers with every level of literacy and internet access. He was mindbogglingly wrong, because he had no idea there was information in the world that he hadn't come across. It's very common - so common it's called engineer syndrome.
    - bsder 2y ago
      And, ironically, I had the exact opposite conversation where we kept paying money to fund customer support phone lines that had one call in 6 months because the sales and marketing team couldn't conceive of the fact that nobody under 30 (our primary demographic) wanted to use voice anymore and were screaming for an app/webapp chat of some form. Not knowing your customers isn't unique to engineers.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Ironically, that's what the companies have been doing for the past few years, by having people talk to voice assistant "AI"s instead of humans. Hell, you could argue the process started much earlier: before voice assistants came DTMF phone menus with automated recordings; before that came outsourcing customer support to cheapest labor available - which is like hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line, except with protein robots paid peanuts and worked to the bone instead.
akozak 2y ago
This won't be a satisfying answer (and won't work for startups), but the solution I saw most frequently was to assign them dedicated diplomats or maintain a middle mgmt class who are well suited to coddle them, absorb most of their emotional energy, and channel it productively (or not) into the wider institution.
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  That’s been my experience as well. But these minders are not cheap. They need to be smart enough to win the respect of their assigned WNs, charismatic enough to smooth everyone else’s ruffled feathers, patient, and have thick skins. Definitely worth it for a Nobel Prize level intellect but I’m not sure how far below that the line is.
  - wisty 2y ago
    The teenagers working at the local McDonalds do a fine job modifying some truly unpleasant people.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      They have the added benefit of not having to give a damn about those people, as they interact infrequently, and likely won't even recognize each other the next time. An occasional unpleasant regular is a different story entirely, but I suppose that's what the security person is there for.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do? Call him to your office and warn him his behaviour is unacceptable as it is interrupting the business. If he still persists, fire him for insubordination and/or disrupting the workplace. The difference between a master and a nerd is whether the talent is socially desired, and the difference between being employed and unemployed is whether you can be productive to society regardless of your personal leanings.
AmericanChopper 2y ago
> You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do? The same thing you do with any highly anti-social employee, fire them. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated their technical skills are, if they are incapable of transforming that into value for the company, then their value to the organisation is at best nothing, and more likely negative. Companies/institutions are social systems, and the phrase “politics” is mostly just used to refer to “social skills”. If too many of the participants are corrupt or incompetent then the social network of the organisation can become especially toxic. But that’s a different problem to the fact that if you want to contribute value in such a system, you need to have social skills. Can you get value out of somebody who has terrible social skills? Maybe sometimes, but it takes a lot of babysitting. Even then, you’ll never be able to properly trust that you’ll be able to rely on them to do anything ever. So it’s almost never worth the cost.
- bradleyjg 2y ago
  Congrats, the university you run just lost out on a Nobel Prize. The donors are going to love that.
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    I’m sure this is the threat that the brilliant asshole types would want you to believe. But there’s no limit to the amount of talent that one single toxically anti-social team member can deter from joining an institution, or that they can chase out of one for that matter. Especially if they’re a senior team member. There’s also essentially no limit to the amount of damage they can do in companies. Even if you put aside the potential impact on company culture, I’ve seen many engineers needlessly waste huge amounts of company resources pursuing solutions that they considered to be technically brilliant (and which may have been), but were completely misaligned with the company’s objectives. I’ve personally witnessed one (especially brilliant) Rust engineer drive a company completely out of business with this approach.
samvher 2y ago
This hurts to read. At my previous employer I more or less carried the technical part of the organization, but also had strong opinions about high level strategy and equity (in terms of pay distribution across staff). In my defense, it was an NGO where I was working well below market rates and the opinions I pushed came from caring a lot about the mission, but it definitely led to a lot of conflict. I think it's an interesting question, how organizations should deal with this. I think my previous employer actually dealt with it quite well - for the issues I cared about I _was_ given the opportunity to express my opinions and also share them with the people who were in the positions for making decisions around these issues. I was generally listened to patiently and also got (sometimes unsatisfying) explanations for why the actual course of action was different. I was _not_ given the authority to make these decisions or push these issues (the ones outside my area of expertise) through. I ended up leaving the organization in quite a bit of frustration, which I think was probably unavoidable, but I learned a ton from this episode, and we're otherwise still on good terms (I help out with little things now and then).

cbozeman 2y ago

"You're out of your depth." That's what you do. A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. Intelligence allows someone to gain that insight faster than those in the middle of the bell curve of IQ, but it doesn't magically confer it. It still takes time, reading, research, and seeing it in practice. Or put another way - what I call the "Iceberg Analogy" - every discipline in life is like an iceberg. The average person sees about 10% of what's actually happening, and is able to comprehend that without too much effort, but the other 90% that's below the surface takes a lot to fully make sense of.

antisthenes 2y ago
> A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. When you talk to people, you have no idea how much time they've spent before that conversation gaining insight. Maybe their simple phrase is a culmination of several years of research and insight, whereas for you, you just thought about this topic yesterday. Seems like normies need to be reminded of that way more frequently than nerds.
mmcgaha 2y ago
A better response would be to tell them you are done trying to convince them because you own the responsibility and consequences of the decision. "You're out of your depth" is an insult and is intended to be one.
- bruce343434 2y ago
  Is saying that someone has no expertise in a subject necessarily an insult? To me, your proposal sounds more like a band-aid, instead of treating the core ailment: someone who won't recognize their own fallibility. Perhaps it can't be "treated", and we just have to make do with such "band aids". But wouldn't it be more productive if we could just get to the root of it?
- cbozeman 2y ago
  "You're out of your depth" is an insult to someone with an excessive ego. If you're not actually out of your depth, you won't be insulted by it. I don't get insulted when someone says I'm stupid. Because that is not true, and I know it isn't true. It isn't the things we know to be untrue that insults us - it's the things that we know to be true, that we can't accept - or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us.
  - xenocratus 2y ago
    > or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us Isn't this the point of the previous comment? That the WN thinks they're not out of their depth and can't see that about themselves. So it is an insult from that perspective.
bsder 2y ago
> "You're out of your depth." Except most of the time ... they are not. Most non-junior WNs learn to have significant respect for those doing the work. The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions. Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled. And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else. The WN can see that you are rewarding the politician rather than the person who actually did the work. The WN will actually calculate the full cap table and see the distortion that flags the insider backscratching. The WN can envision exactly how the sales incentives will be exploited. etc. Effectively, the WN is a canary that detects bad managers immediately unlike normal people. And that's something that bad managers simply cannot abide.
- lazyasciiart 2y ago
  I have been in a meeting where the weird nerd is saying "our company should completely ditch customer support phone lines and only use a chat service because I don't know anyone who wants to make a phone call". This company was a utility that had customers with every level of literacy and internet access. He was mindbogglingly wrong, because he had no idea there was information in the world that he hadn't come across. It's very common - so common it's called engineer syndrome.
  - bsder 2y ago
    And, ironically, I had the exact opposite conversation where we kept paying money to fund customer support phone lines that had one call in 6 months because the sales and marketing team couldn't conceive of the fact that nobody under 30 (our primary demographic) wanted to use voice anymore and were screaming for an app/webapp chat of some form. Not knowing your customers isn't unique to engineers.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Ironically, that's what the companies have been doing for the past few years, by having people talk to voice assistant "AI"s instead of humans. Hell, you could argue the process started much earlier: before voice assistants came DTMF phone menus with automated recordings; before that came outsourcing customer support to cheapest labor available - which is like hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line, except with protein robots paid peanuts and worked to the bone instead.

akozak 2y ago

This won't be a satisfying answer (and won't work for startups), but the solution I saw most frequently was to assign them dedicated diplomats or maintain a middle mgmt class who are well suited to coddle them, absorb most of their emotional energy, and channel it productively (or not) into the wider institution.

bradleyjg 2y ago
That’s been my experience as well. But these minders are not cheap. They need to be smart enough to win the respect of their assigned WNs, charismatic enough to smooth everyone else’s ruffled feathers, patient, and have thick skins. Definitely worth it for a Nobel Prize level intellect but I’m not sure how far below that the line is.
- wisty 2y ago
  The teenagers working at the local McDonalds do a fine job modifying some truly unpleasant people.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    They have the added benefit of not having to give a damn about those people, as they interact infrequently, and likely won't even recognize each other the next time. An occasional unpleasant regular is a different story entirely, but I suppose that's what the security person is there for.

Dalewyn 2y ago

AmericanChopper 2y ago

> You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do? The same thing you do with any highly anti-social employee, fire them. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated their technical skills are, if they are incapable of transforming that into value for the company, then their value to the organisation is at best nothing, and more likely negative. Companies/institutions are social systems, and the phrase “politics” is mostly just used to refer to “social skills”. If too many of the participants are corrupt or incompetent then the social network of the organisation can become especially toxic. But that’s a different problem to the fact that if you want to contribute value in such a system, you need to have social skills. Can you get value out of somebody who has terrible social skills? Maybe sometimes, but it takes a lot of babysitting. Even then, you’ll never be able to properly trust that you’ll be able to rely on them to do anything ever. So it’s almost never worth the cost.

bradleyjg 2y ago
Congrats, the university you run just lost out on a Nobel Prize. The donors are going to love that.
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  I’m sure this is the threat that the brilliant asshole types would want you to believe. But there’s no limit to the amount of talent that one single toxically anti-social team member can deter from joining an institution, or that they can chase out of one for that matter. Especially if they’re a senior team member. There’s also essentially no limit to the amount of damage they can do in companies. Even if you put aside the potential impact on company culture, I’ve seen many engineers needlessly waste huge amounts of company resources pursuing solutions that they considered to be technically brilliant (and which may have been), but were completely misaligned with the company’s objectives. I’ve personally witnessed one (especially brilliant) Rust engineer drive a company completely out of business with this approach.

samvher 2y ago

This hurts to read. At my previous employer I more or less carried the technical part of the organization, but also had strong opinions about high level strategy and equity (in terms of pay distribution across staff). In my defense, it was an NGO where I was working well below market rates and the opinions I pushed came from caring a lot about the mission, but it definitely led to a lot of conflict. I think it's an interesting question, how organizations should deal with this. I think my previous employer actually dealt with it quite well - for the issues I cared about I _was_ given the opportunity to express my opinions and also share them with the people who were in the positions for making decisions around these issues. I was generally listened to patiently and also got (sometimes unsatisfying) explanations for why the actual course of action was different. I was _not_ given the authority to make these decisions or push these issues (the ones outside my area of expertise) through. I ended up leaving the organization in quite a bit of frustration, which I think was probably unavoidable, but I learned a ton from this episode, and we're otherwise still on good terms (I help out with little things now and then).