Quirky Engineers Gone the Way of the Dinosaur?

Milican writes "I think its time we ask our fellow Slashdotters, 'is there still room in a company for a quirky 'guru', or are projects so large now by necessity team-based development rules.' Read this article on Embedded.com and decide for yourself." I think this article didn't describe someone really 'quirky' though - it was someone who didn't really want to work.

Comments

Weird co-workers

[eusdlwy]

A pretty normal co-worker of mine once told me of a software engineer he had worked with at a previous company. This engineer would write software and during the debugging process hold a conversation with his hand concerning the problem at hand. The best part was, his hand (he) would talk back to himself in the voice of Donald Duck.

The same guy was also said to have hit a deer with his car on the way to work one morning. The next day he came to work with a home-made "cow catcher" like contraption (imagine the front of locomotive) welded to the front of his car to avoid any further damage due to auto-deer collisions. The big problem with this "solution" was that the contraption was so heavy, every time his car hit a bump in the road, the front end would scrape the pavement and send off sparks.

Anyone have weird co-worker stories to share?

Re:Weird co-workers

[The Panther!]

One of my office mates was an interesting fellow. He had a real problem making eye contact with people, loud noises, or physical contact. I wouldn't call him a guru, exactly, but competent I suppose. It's hard to call someone a guru when they largely remind you of a squirrel. For kicks, a coworker would sneak up behind him and scream AHHHH!! just to watch him go white and literally run out of the room.

Another guy was a neat freak. He knew exactly the precise angle of every object on his desk. A coworker would screw with him by rotating his stapler 180 degrees. Every morning the ritual was to watch him rearrange everything into precise order. He couldn't work unless everything was perfect.

And then there's the really freaky people that you only hear about in whispers... like the guy who would walk around in socks mumbling calculus to himself, drinking beer and eating reeses pieces at noon, and while drunk, getting naked in front of the security guard because he forgot his identification in his office and she wouldn't let him in... best that we don't think about that too much!

Re:Weird co-workers

[mons]

I had a co-worker who didn't beleieve in numbered versions of a file so instead of save something like "file_2_3.xxx" , "file_2_4.xxx",
he saved as "this_is_the_one.xxx", "this_is_the_one2.xxx","this_is_the_REAL_one.xxx", "final_version.xxx", "the_absolutelly_final_version.xxx", "forget_the_rest_this_is_the_one.xxx", "forget_the_rest_this_is_the_one2.xxx" and so on, we defined that as the Morales Notation.

Re:Weird co-workers

[Grab]

Current job: Tempting, but some of them might recognise themselves, and my website is shown in my ID! :-) Ah what the hell... Our top engineer is _seriously_ hot on damn near everything. He also has a long, flowing white beard which would put Gandalf to shame. But the kicker - he dresses monochromatically. By which I mean every item of clothing (every visible one, anyway - the rest I don't want to know ;-) is the same colour, including his socks and sandals. He has two sets of these, one in pillarbox red and one in light blue. But by god, does he ever work!

Previous job: Another genius type. Bulgarian. He worked with ear defenders on bcos he said the rest of the office were too noisy. When he got a few new ppl in the office, he said this wasn't good bcos of the negative ions - his ioniser could cope with a few ppl, but more than that would cause problems. :-) When stuck, he'd go outside, walk up and down a while talking to himself, then almost run inside and type frantically. But he's the only guy I've ever known who could knock out several hundred lines of code and have it work perfectly first time, every time - he got very annoyed one day when the compiler spotted a syntax error in his code!

Neither are exactly normal humans, but when the sh*t hits the fan, you're damn glad they're on your side! :-)

Grab.

It's all in the beard.

[Nindalf]

Guru (gu'ru): from ancient Hindi guy (guy) and uru (beard) literally "guy with a freaky big beard." Modern meaning: guy with a freaky big beard (generally bad personal hygiene habits add. imp.).

Re:Quirky-ness not always appreciated

[The Cat]

We didn't see or hear anything from ZZ for a couple of years after that. One day we had a big project that wasn't going well and our manager hired a consulting company to come in and help straighten things out. He asked for their best man. As you've probably guessed, the engineer who showed up was none other than ZZ himself. He had taken a year off to motorcycle across Asia before joining the consulting company. He was making 3 times what he was before. Our manager had to grit his teeth and refer to ZZ as "Mister ZZ" (ZZ insisted) until the project was completed.

(Wipes tear from eye) *sniff* That was beautiful... ;)

Re:Question for *you*

[Magumbo]

...don't have the first clue about how (or even why) one would go about implementing a RAID array in the real world.

ATM machine.
PIN number.
RAID array.

It's all about redundancy, baby.