> When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in. Definitively not the experience I have at

> When you are an adult, being a jerk usually never pays, unless you are surrounded by jerks and you want to fit in. Definitively not the experience I have at working in large companies. It is a coincidence because I have had that very same discussion with colleagues last week and we collected the stories. In our experience being a jerk always pays off if you have higher aspiration than staying in your team (i.e. you want to be promoted or move to a different team) Our conclusion is that big companies don't fire somebody without bullet proof objective reasons and since most employees at all level are non confrontational, the jerk are never called on their bullshit. So you get the jerk accusing everybody of murder and nobody calling him on it, which is the end of any HR move to fire him. The other option is to move them around until they end up in the position where they are less toxic. So we all ended up with variation of stories like "The boss told us he knew the guy was a jerk, and not to worry about his attempt to sink the team: nobody is taking him seriously" that eventually conclude with the guy moving to be somebody else problem until he eventually get what he wanted ( promotion, raise, ... )