Going on a decade ago, I worked with a DBA who would get angry and scream about things and often at me because I was one of the few willing to butt head’s with him. He would want to change something in the database schema and I would calmly explain how that wouldn’t work for the business logic it was representing. He’d go on to berate you and the data design.
He was very difficult to work with, but also inarguably one of the smartest people I have ever met. I learned so much from him that I still use today. We were even relatively friendly outside of work topics, talked about our mutual interest in minimalist music pretty often.
When he was let go for obvious reasons, I was the strangest combination of upset and relieved I have ever experienced.
At a previous job, I worked with such a person as well (not a DBA, though). Everyone tried to avoid working with him to the greatest degree possible -- except me.
His emotions didn't bother me at all, and pretty quickly he came to like me exactly because I wasn't afraid of him and was always honest with him about my professional opinions.
Eventually, though, I became his de facto "contact point", and everyone else who needed to interact with him would come to me and have me do it instead. That ended up being a huge downside.
The combination of difficult + genius is a pretty standard deal. At a certain level of brilliance, it becomes challenging to communicate ideas, or more importantly, their implied value proposition to the business. Much of the time there is also some ego conflict on the team that evolves into a vicious cycle that requires superhuman reflection to unwind.
For me, the best hackaround for friction is a demo. If I want to prove a controversial idea to the team, I build it first in my own time and then show it. Talking about and planning to do big scary things is 99% of the drama source in my life. Sometimes the demo goes off rails too, but it has a much better chance.
After doing this for a while, I still believe the most potent off-hand mastery that a genius technologist could obtain is the sales pitch. Treating your team members just like your customers and hacking their brains into wanting what you propose is the ultimate skill - if you can pull it off. If you can't convince your team regarding your idea, it may not matter how brilliant it is. Dragging 10-20 horses to water is mostly infeasible for one person to accomplish without reaching for cartoon villain tactics (which would ultimately kill the whole business).
I've done the sales pitch a few times. My go-to trick is to present 3-4 options, one of which is the option I want the team to really go with. The other options are framed in such a way that everyone feels super smart picking the one I wanted all along. Carefully-crafted options can move mountains.
That reminds me of a client we had at a previous job. He would constantly stress out the system far beyond what others did. At one point I heard "100x" thrown around.
It let me fix major bottlenecks in our system long before it affected other customers, and we could just shut him off for a while (it was in his contract after a while) until I fixed the problem.
I was a little sad when they finally banned him for good, but the rest of the company was rather relieved.
I've had a DBA refuse to do something for me, with me being a contractor and he being full timer. I remember I basically said "I've a dev, you're an admin your purpose in life is to implement what I build, given I have no access, so just fucking do it".
I'd previously had someone talk smack to me on the phone when I needed something, so I hung up and went over to their desk and chewed them out loudly.
This was the same place where one day after work I was at the pub with my workmates and I was profanely bad mouthing the head of IT as an incompetent boob (with just cause) and everyone was kicking me under the table trying to get me to shut up because his offsider was at the table listening. Two days later I look up to see him being marched past my desk and off the premises by security. He'd been fired.
So maybe I was the bad person in that office, but these people just refused to do their job for no explicable reason. I remember everyone told me they've never heard anyone swear at work as much as I did, but they named a server after me after I left so they seemed to appreciate me.
Hope you took some personal reflection out of that instead of just concluding with "well I got my namesake at the job so that's nice". I don't got time to yell at people, I took an IC track for a reason.
If I'm blocked, that's a lead's or manager's problem to solve or escalate. As a bonus, it leaves a paper trail that I don't need to lay out most of to begin with (just get it rolling).
I didn't yell at anyone who didn't yell at me first, I merely gave as good as I got. My manager didn't want to know about this sort of minor stuff, you don't go crying to them with every small thing they just get annoyed. They already know that these people are problematic, I wasn't the first person to have these problems.
In every other job I did not have this experience. Everyone was fine and polite and did their jobs, and so was I. The above job was in a merchant bank in London and very high pressure, yet people were slack and useless. I just called them out on their behavior. I was never reprimanded for any of my behaviour. My manager's manager invited me to return when I left (I had to leave due to an illness in my family) because of my work.
Some workplaces are just dysfunctional, like this one, the fact that the head of department was sacked gives you an idea. I was one of the few people who stood up to this culture and plowed through and fixed things. I sorted out several system breaking bugs while I was there, that has festered for years.
>My manager didn't want to know about this sort of minor stuff, you don't go crying to them with every small thing they just get annoyed
in my eyes, cool. Its their job to be annoyed and solve the people issues. If they don't want to do their job, why should I do it for them? They are probably paid more than me precisely to solve the annoying problems.
That's just my view of things. I've tried to be loyal and put the best intentions of the company first and everytime they lay me off without a second thought. I'm not on nor am interested in management track so I'm not going to "rise up to the occasion" and do more communication and leadership than I'm expected to. I was never rewarded for trying to fix dysfunctional behavior so I don't see the benefit for me.
But hey, if it worked out for you that's good. We all have different experiences. You mentioning London implies you probably have the exact opposite problem with terminating employees than I do (in the US), so I can start to see your POV on the issue.
Thanks for the reply.
Was wondering how did future pan out for someone talented but hard to work with.
Would they have a rather tumultuous career, or have their talent recognized hence very successful or even if they started their own
They’re the ones who have to catch all the nonsense dropped from above. They’re like offensive lineman - never get credit for success, only blame when something goes wrong.
their worries about not being much good at their job? the one time i tried to get one to look at our database design, the response was "it looks complicated". when compared with the back end for the trading system they were supposed to be supporting (but didn't), it was really simple.
I don't feel like I am. That said, I'm sure that's what a lot of people who are hard to work with would say.
I'm opinionated and willing to stand up for what I believe is correct, but I'm soft spoken. I think the difference between the DBA and myself is that I am very open to other people's opinions and ideas. A fair number of my coworkers followed me here from a previous job.
For a while, I was being a little harsh and short with people on code reviews. I could sense how people were reacting though and actively sought to be better. I worked with a friend who is a software mentorship advocate on how to better communicate effectively.
As much as I hate the term, I think a little emotional intelligence and self reflection goes a long way.
The brilliant jerk thing is, in my experience, largely a myth. If someone is highly intelligent, they will realize acting like a jerk is not helpful and causes them problems, and they will correct that behavior. People who persist in acting like a rude child beyond college, in my experience, get credited as brilliant because people are intimidated by their attitude. But if you look at their actual accomplishments and delivered value, it will be unimpressive.
Unfortunately not everyone we dislike is bad. I think this is a case of the fundamental attribution error: Most mean people aren't inherently mean, but are in circumstances that have made them so.
Yes, there are newgrad "rockstars" that can't play nice, and end up not being very productive. But there are also veteran engineers who have stayed at companies through 3 years of 100% attrition and are not super interested in listening to the opinion of the 4th junior backfill on some minor improvement to a system they architected and have been given 0 time to pay down technical debt on. Or maybe they are going through a messy divorce and the stress of it bleeds into their professional life.
I've gotten a lot of good out of finding such individuals, assuming they're reasonable people, and doing what I can to make their lives a little better.
Most people are not bad, and most of the time when two people don't get along, it's not because either of them are bad people. It's usually just a chemistry thing.
The one brilliant "jerk" I work with works mainly by himself. He's been isolated from everyone else. I say "jerk" because he doesn't seem like one to me, he's just disagreeble. I've noted in most working environments, especially remote ones, being tactful is of the upmost importance, which is odd in an engineering environment where having correct and efficient solutions would be the most important. Me being somewhat disagreeable, I actually like the guy because he doesn't beat around the bush. But alas, one person's honesty is another person's "rude" behavior.
> which is odd in an engineering environment where having correct and efficient solutions would be the most important.
Whenever people have to work together as a team, social skills become at least as important as technical ones.
That's why whenever I've interviewed job applicants, my main concern is "how well will they function on the team", not "do they have all the necessary skills". Assuming that someone is smart and likes to learn, skills can be taught. Fitting in on a team, though, cannot.
>Assuming that someone is smart and likes to learn, skills can be taught.
wish you can tell that to the current job market. Tons of jobs I wasn't even given time to talk to a technical reviewer for because it seems people right now just want the perfect candidate who will be productive from day zero.
I guess a person with low agreeableness will be more likely to "point out errors in the socially agreed convention". And therefore be seen as both brilliant, and as jerks.
There are different kinds of intelligence, and they often don't correlate to each other. A brilliant coder can absolutely be an emotional infant. It will handicap their career, for sure, but doesn't entirely preclude their ability to solve certain kinds of problems.
I don't think I've seen this be the case -- since there are quite a few crappy and/or poorly paying jobs (in comparison) that become desperate for workers, there's plenty of room for abusive and jerky people.
That's ignoring other broken parts of the system, such as nepotism.
I feel like their prevalence in tech has decreased in the last 10 years in the places I've worked. They are not allowed to maintain their bad behavior from my experience, or they are drummed out of the organization relatively quickly before they get the opportunity to be indispensable.
The "bitter old timer" doesn't happen as often anymore either, as people generally leave a job before they get too bitter due to the opportunities available.
That's sad because the old timers generally have a lot of wisdom to share. They are usually also the ones at that stage in life where they are willing to mentor someone.
To clarify, I am speaking about seniority at a particular company combined with a bitterness toward that company because they are trapped. I think having older ICs is still incredibly valuable!
Their prevalence has decreased because there are so many other engineers. For every person who was programming in the 1990s, there are at least a hundred that started in the 2010s and many of the former struck it rich and retired. Mentorship can't scale to those numbers.
There may be something to that - I don't think I've met anyone like that in the last 15+ years. Mind you, I might have got better at picking better to people to work with.
I wonder if this correlates in any way with improvements in mental health support (it's not perfect by a long shot, but it is better)
In my professional life I've been called a genius, and I've been called an asshole. I've never intentionally gone out of my way to be either, but it is what it is. A decade or so of struggling to get my points across without being an asshat about it I discovered I have ADHD.
Job security has always come with the ability to really deep dive into the things everyone else had trouble figuring out. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria seems to have been a likely culprit for the asshat side of things - I spent all this time figuring out the answer, and they aren't listening to me, these people are idiots!
With a bit of medication, a lot of self-help reading, and a healthy dose of cognitive behavioural therapy I'm so much better at interacting with people, and as a bonus I no longer have to bulldoze them into realising my ideas/fixes/etc are the better option (when they are, of course!). I've noticed people are no longer starting off on the defensive with their shields up to full whenever I pipe up now.
Just throwing a thought into the ether. I do acknowledge there's probably a lot of wise old timers retiring out of the system causing the decrease, as well as the points you made, but you'd think there'd be a few more new and upcoming greybeards taking their place.
I'm not saying it is for sure related, just wondering if anyone else can see a similar connection in their experiences?
Not trying to diagnose every bitter genius in a one-shot or anything either, just thinking if there is a correlation to former bitters becoming easier to work with after mental health treatments it feels like it should definitely be explored further. In my anecdotal experience the difference has been absolute night and day, work life is so much easier now.
In my experience in academia, it isn’t a myth at all. So much brilliant scholarship in my own field has been produced by people who are infamously ornery and prickly, and who don’t fit in with the departments they are at purely due to social reasons, not scholarly ones. It’s actually a problem that the modern tenure and grant system requires people to be very socially functioning and schmoozing.
oh yeah, it happens so much in college because college students aren't and usually can't be "interviewed" face to face. your submission is a combination of GPA, national test score, a very short essay (that may or may not be written by you), and whatever other clubs/accomplishments on the side you can convince the admissions office is noteworthy. Perfect environment for the brilliant jerk.
I'd say half get filtered out somehow from the work force (be it in interviews or because they choose to focus on Acedemia) but a lot will still get through given the bar of a graduate junior.
Aptitude with a technology certainly correlates with intelligence, but it doesn't necessarily imply above-average intelligence.
Some people attain their skills through Herculean levels of hard work, rather than reading about it once and the information just clicking because of their excellent brains. (Though, in my experience, they tend to also be less arrogant than techno-prodigies, but YMMV.)
Self-awareness is, similarly, orthogonal to intelligence (as you correctly state).
I find it interesting that an assumption of equivalence (or, at least, strong correlation) is so prevalent among tech workers and their friends.
sometimes you just don't have the full context on the situation. I used to work with a systems dev manager who was notorious for getting mad, yelling, and questioning every little detail whenever an external team went to him for launch signoff. at first, I thought the guy was just an asshole. what I gradually figured out was that the application teams had been outright lying about designs, fabricating test results, and only involving him at the last second to launch a pile of trash on the critical infrastructure he was responsible for. this had been going on for years and resulted in several major outages.
sure, he could probably have been a bit more diplomatic instead of blowing his stack every time, but there's only so much a person can take.
>If someone is highly intelligent, they will realize acting like a jerk is not helpful and causes them problems
That doesn't appear to happen for other unhelpful behavior. Plenty of brilliant people with severe issues with all sorts of other criminal or self-destructive habits.
It's funny because that's how I think of most people going into management and above. They are smart, yet they will walk over you if you get in their way.
I was... maybe not brilliant, but pretty good. I also was at least a borderline jerk - arrogant and not very nice. It took me at least a decade out of college to get better.
My wife and kids think I'm on the autism spectrum, though I have never been diagnosed. Whether or not it's true, "people" is a language that it took me a long time to learn.
The increased visibility about Autism has helped in the workplace somewhat. When someone is able to be diagnosed, they are given the resources to help navigate the neurotypical world, and managers have been expected to adjust their communication styles for a neuro-diverse workforce.
Autistic people still are not given all of the opportunities to succeed, and training is uneven at best, but it's certainly on the right trajectory.
That said, please consider looking at confirming a diagnosis. If you are indeed on the spectrum, you may benefit from knowing and learning adaptive strategies.
Many times it's not like they are a complete jerk - I sometimes they are just not really caring how they come across. The thing is - if no one is ever disagreeing with them they can be quite pleasant to work with!
He was very difficult to work with, but also inarguably one of the smartest people I have ever met. I learned so much from him that I still use today. We were even relatively friendly outside of work topics, talked about our mutual interest in minimalist music pretty often.
When he was let go for obvious reasons, I was the strangest combination of upset and relieved I have ever experienced.