Slashdot Mirror
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.
For fuck's sake, did they not interview this stinky flea-bag?
Someone who can't take any care over their appearance is not liable to take any care over anything else, either.
"Information wants to be paid"
He just didnt want to work.
There is always room for individualism and outright wierdness on a team, as long as the person can communicate and somewhat meet deadlines.
However, the best developers and engineers I have ever known are always out working on personal projects. Its a way to get your juices flowing when you have been stumped on a problem for a few days/weeks.
If it only lasts a day or so, and only happens every few weeks, it was encouraged in all the teams I've been in.
Looks like they had a bad experience with one guy and concluded all lone geniuses do not exist. What's wrong with this picture?
This piece raises more questions than it answers.
I'm curious about how the quirky one managed to demonstrate mastery of the system he was being employed to develop, yet so spectacularly failed when he actually had to produce the goods. Certainly it seems like he didn't have single-minded attention on the job in hand (but even engineers deserve a life).
I'd be interested to hear his side of the story: there could have been plenty of internal organisational reasons or technical reasons why he didn't gel, which the author of the piece may not be so forthcoming about.
And, if his body odour was really a problem to his inter-relationships with colleagues (and it sounds like it was), why did he not obtain medical help? (Or work from home?)
It all smells a bit one-sidedly fishy to me.
You can never eat too much, only cycle too little.
the difference here is that your quirky guy s good, while the one in hte article is just quirky . . .
heck, if all you want is quirky, just go downtown in any big city . . .
hawk
"Guru"? Nothing he did worked. How, exactly, did this person attain "guru" status? Sure, the guy trying to get rid of him claimed he had knowlege, but why assume he had skills? (Esp. for the people posting without reading the article.)
There's an amusing stereotype at work in the posts here... we are automatically granting "guru" status because he is quirky. Sorry, I still look for skillz, and all the evidence suggests that was lacking. (Uncommented assembly may indicate guru status, but only when it works... when it doesn't work, it indicates an overestimation of personal skill. Not much middle ground here.)
The fact is that there is every bit as much room for an exceptionally talented person to bend the rules as there ever has been. Our definition of exceptionally talented is rising, though. (Besides, eccentricity itself seems to be on the decline.)
I don't think our most valuable guy could design a way out of a paper bag, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to touch code after he's been through it. But in a few hours, he can singlehandedly double or triple the performance of code that most people are afraid to touch.
It's okay, in my book, if people want to pursue weird interests during office hours, or if they want to keep really weird hours, so long as a steady amount of work is getting done. A lot of the best programmers I know work this way to some extent, and it keeps them fresh and interested.
That said, the guy in the article wasn't a quirky genius. He was a circus side-show. If I have to keep pushing someone to work, they don't stay on my team, because having to spend hours each day supervising them eats into my productivity. If their code doesn't work and they can't fix it straight off, that's also useless to me. And I don't think I should ever have to remind someone to get into work - if they disappear for a few days and they haven't been in a coma, sent a postcard from wherever they eloped to, or come back with some really fucking amazing code to show for the time, I don't think there'd be a position to come back to.
That said, we don't live in Utopia - some programmers are simply better than others, but if you don't have a process in place to support migration and redistribtion of that work load, you will regret it.
Windows guys, hardware techs, network techs, and most any position that can be filled with a few hundred hours of training or an associates degree is becomming very clean cut and corperate. There is an abundance of these guys and management can hire people who fit the corperate image rather than more "quirky" candidates.
In other areas, the supply is still scarce, and you take what you can get. (As the article says, they were having a hard time finding someone qualified).
The place I see the most freedom these days though, is with Web Developers and Graphic Artists. They're supposed to be creative, expressive, and different. I think they have to be a little quirky to get past the interview.
If I can't see it in Lynx I'm not interested.
Maybe it's just me and being somewhat inexperienced in the ways of company legalities, but how would there be issues with not giving someone good references? Shouldn't there be something there to allow one employer tell another about a guy like the one in the story?
Very easy check:
If he's not able to make himself socially presentable for an interview, don't hire him.
Why should I hire a candidate, who doesn't grasp the simple rules by which the hiring-game is played? He gives the impression about himself, that he's either stupid, or that he doesn't care about the rules a business operates. In both cases, he'll be a liability I don't want on my team.
However, the man is an idiot. He's tempermental, and solves some problems quickly but others not at all (and never answers forms of communication if he isn't going to help). He is also in a position where developers frequently need his help to be able to do their job (we're required to go through him).
Despite his technical brilliance, I don't think that any developer here would rather have him than somebody with 100th of his talent who was easier to work with. If they need help, we have plenty of non-quirky expertise and can always call tech support from various vendors. It's better to have reliable good help than spotty expert help.
We do have some quirky geniuses here that I do like, by the way (they're my heroes). It's just that they are quirky geniuses who also happen to be non-vindictive and responsible.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
I happen to be working on a project that has only 3 people on it. I would hardly call it a "team" effort. The only team ideas that we have are, "What are you working on so I don't duplicate your effort?"
I would call all three of us quirky, in some way, shape or form. One guy constantly shows up late, another is more interested in paintball at times than work, I probably spend too much time worrying about whether or not there is enough food and coffee (for me, not the office).
We each have our own opinions about how the project is to be built, and our own methods of going about building it, but the one thing we do have in common is that none of us are out right schmucks, like "Tom" in the article.
That guy just sounds like a putz. I wouldn't call him quirky, I'd call him an asshole. Too lazy to understand that with a paycheck, comes obligation.
When I hire folks, I don't give a damn how eccentric they are, just as long as they understand the obligation bit, and produce.
The problem is this; developers who work 9-5 and are 'normal' as society portrays rarely meet coding challenges outside work, and, as such, will not have the broad knowledge gained from reading around the subject. Social outcasts may well not understand business needs, but, if their time is spent wisely, DO understand the intrinsics and tricks of lower level code in order to get the job done better than the competition.
It all depends on the task in hand.
Being one of these somewhat quirky, highly individual, 11 year *.com techies, I have some insight on this issue.
First, the type of person mentioned in this article is more like a corporate myth in the sense of an urban myth. I have rarely come across such useless people and have never tolerated them in my environments. If the author of this article had spent the time it took to type it on interviewing the candidate I am sure he could have avoided the whole situation.
Frankly there is some merit to what the point the author is trying to make, altho not perhaps the exact point.
There is little tolerance in the corporate market right now for individual thinkers, loners if you will, and especially to guru's seeking lots of perks even if it is for lots of good work. This is somewhat understandable, I mean, how many of you have had engineers over-use the flexible schedule you allow them? How many of you have had to insist that your employees wear their shoes when running around the office, not sleep under their desk, or to get some dandruff shampoo? I am sure there are plenty of these cases.
Unfortunately, the cattle of corporate culture have had a bit of a knee jerk reaction to the whole 'crash' and the climate is rediculously herd-like. This is not the answer, and frankly this type of extremism won't last just as the type of free-wheeling internet company culture didn't.
To give you an example: The vendor of our new billing, provisioning, and CRM system had informed one of our developers that they had completed his assigned project for him: integrating a web based filemanager into their system. Of course QA signed off on it but it was never really tested. Four days before the launch, it was noticed by a support person and brought to general attention that the program authenticated but didn't work at all. Basically, the vendor did a small portion of the work.
Being the most Sr. technical person and the most proficient developer in house (I run R&D and Eng.), I end up being the 'buck-stops-here' guy. So, I spent that Thursday, Friday, and Saturday working from home 18 hours per day to complete the integration work, full regression testing, and documentation.
On monday, the CEO calls me and his other direct reports into a meeting at 9:00am. I was expecting significant praise for getting a tough project done in time to save the launch date of a 7 month project. What I got instead was a general message to send to my staff and the rest of the company that we must be at the office working from 9:00am till 6:00pm mon-fri regardless.
When I asked him how he would address the issue of me working from home (we have a very interruptive workplace) in order to complete the a key task on time and extensive use of my personal time, he basically responded that he wanted me to do the work at the office (including the Saturday work) and made some comment about being paid the big-bucks... This discussion degraded into him sharing his perception that all of the technology group was over-paid and under-performing. He made some exeption for me, saying I worked hard just was over-paid. He also has the impression that job market is so bad that we must accept his perceptions. All of us made cases in return and he waved them off without further discussion (he is a pretty bad manager when it comes to conflict).
Of course I will do what is asked. I am quirky, individual, driven, but am a team player. I also know how to make a point. The next time this sort of thing happens (which is often), I'll insist on being paid the OT in my contract. I'll also go back to making him personally call me when he needs help from me on my time when the operations team is unable to fix a problem.
Altho this sounds like so much bitching, my friends in similar situations all tell similar stories. Even tho they are successfull, productive, typically over-worked, gurus, they are treated like they resemble the man mentioned in the article above. It's unfortunate, but this is reality for many. Far more real and far more common than type type of situation portrayed in the article on embedded.com.
How do I handle it? Patience. For now, I just wait. The *.com boom had an end, the *.com crash will too. I try to show good work, productivity, and I try to be more agreeable. I keep my more innovative ideas to myself, saved for a time when they are more acceptable to the herd.
rr.
the thing is though -- you CANT run a software business like an assembly line. there is no blueprint - every project is unique. systems change often, bugs crop up in everything from the OS, compiler to the development platform. it takes creativity to fix all that and an assembly line drone simply will not have that creativity.
i've gone days doing nothing simply because my mind was a blank -- i couldnt code. ive gone thru periods where i can code 24/7 and not even feel it. you can impose a 9-5 schedule but then the productivity of your best programmers will plummet like a rock. would you rather have the product up and running with a minimal of bugs in 8 months or 4 years ? i've been on a project where i threw out every single line of code developed over 4 YEARS by multiple consultants (4-5 mil $'s) with an aseembly line approach and rewrote the whole thing in 8 months to produce a working and sellable product. what would you rather have ?
So what if you are a guy with calico colored hair who wears a skirt? Can you fix our problems? Yes? Great? That's what I've seen before, and I expect it will remain that way as long as we have the attitude that "diversity" and stuff like that matters.
When times were good, this was especially so. I used to describe the interview process to people like this:
Interviewer I see you have a felony drug conviction... oh wait. You answered that question about TCP/IP correctly. You're hired!
Interviewee Great. When do I start?
Of course now that people are being layed off left and right, it won't be quite this easy. OTOH, if the guy has a great resume I bet they still don't care what he looks like.
As for the guy in the article, he was just a bum. Even "back in the day" performance mattered. It might have taken a few months back then, but anybody who didn't perform got let go sooner or later; with no regard to race, creed, or hair color.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Six developers, four managers.
Wow, no wonder it costs $12 to cash a check.
Don't confuse activity with productivity.
The reason he sits idle is because he fixes problems quickly, and often before they occur.
I guess you're one of these typical managers who likes to see a sysadmin running around madly from place to place, not realizing that all he's doing is restarting servers instead of figuring out why they're going down in the first place and fixing the real problem.
Anyway, go ahead and confront the competent sysadmin. You'll find that you won't be able to fire him, because he'll quit and get a new job where he's appreciated before you even finish your first sentence.
I get very little trouble for being quirky, though. I've even had jobs where they make a point of bringing interview candidates past my office.
The most important part of being a quirky engineer is being competent. You have to make it abundantly clear that your quirkiness doesn't detrimentally affect your job performance.
Raw productivity, though, is not enough. You also need to be present during reasonable hours to be accessible as a resource to the other engineers, to answer questions for folks from other parts of the company (such as Marketing and QA), and you have to make it to the meetings.
I'm not sure how long this is going to last as an available mode of operation. As more and more people become programmers because it's a job, rather than because they like messing around with computers and are willing to redirect their messing around for pay, the fraction of quirky programmers will diminish. (I've experimented with inducing it-- when one previous job changed buildings, I purchased the Medium-Sized Treasure Box, the Bag of Mystery, and a gallon of Tiny Treasures from Archie McPhee, spread them all out on a spare desk, and said "It's free!" Unbeknownst to me, a friend in QA spread a lie that I'd be terribly hurt if people didn't take at least one. Weird goodies spread over the entire company, and some people started bringing in some of their own.) As long as we can keep the correlation of quirkiness and competence high, though, we should be able to keep software engineering safe for weirdness for a good while yet.
"Before enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice. After enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice."
I love hiring and working with quirky people. But for all the romance of having a rag-tag, superhero-caliber team, you'd better be prepared to step up to the management plate in a big way. If you hire sheep and lemmings, your job as project leader will be relatively simple. If you hire the moody geniuses, you better give them some clear goals, lots of milestones (that are verifiable), and for god's sake, when you hire someone, put them on probation or under contract with some really explicit goals for a few months. If you can black-box their responsibilities, even better, because then you don't have to worry about tracking hours or social interaction as much. But make the terms of probation very clear and tell them 1) you don't care how they do it (this will earn their respect), 2) what you expect to be delivered and how you plan to test/verify it very critically, 3) that time is of the essense (eventually, they'll be put on a project where it is), and 4) what the consequences will be if they succeed and if they fail. Keep the trial period short and make no excuses or apologies in the end if you cut your losses. Try to keep the candidate on relevant tasks but out of the critical path of current projects. That's ideal, I know, and doing so can be very expensive, especially for a small company. But consider it part of the investment in acquiring an employee and be prepared to walk away from your sunk costs spent evaluating someone. I've met very few managers who can do this well, including myself.
The guy in the article was no guru or genius -- he was a burned-out slob, whose sole accomplishment was rising to the challenge of getting hired.
That depends on your vision of competence.
Jack "Neutron" Welch's idea of management was to fire everybody and use up young, arrogant management types who were willing do work 24/7 and chant GE's mantra.
Those who were able to continue were promoted. Those who were not quit, suffered health problems and got laid off.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I've been the guru, the guy with the answers in the middle of the night when the last demon from Hell has just run through your server rack. I've been through the adjustment.
The moment your 'quirks' start to keep any significant part of the organization from functioning well, you'd better start making things right. No matter what rabbit you can pull out of your hat, most management won't let you keep waving it when the rest of the crew wants to hang you.
The web paradigm, with lots of smaller pieces making up large enterprise application, makes the guru less of an asset. The guru isn't going to make a monumental impact on a 500 line servlet. The guru is the guy who knows that there's a gotcha back in some back corner of the 100,000 lines of application code. In the early days there were poeple who could dazzle the crowd with web tricks, but it's too well known, and most people now know that web programming isn't all that tough.
- Sig this!
Though somewhat dated now, there's a great section from one of the stories ("Ex Machina," 1948) which could have been written today: "The social trend always lags behind the technological one...moreover, an electronic duplicator could infringe not only on patents but on property right, and attroneys prepared volumious breifs on such issues as whether "rarity rights" are real property...the world, slightly punch-drunk on technology, was trying desperately to walk a straight line...It was all perfectly clear to the technicians, but they were much too impractical to be consulted; they were apt to remark "So my gadget unstabilizes property rights? Well-why have property rights then?"
Not bad for half a century before Napster...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm too young to know which version was correct, though it seems to me that both versions certainly can have merit. In fact, they're probably the exact same story, just from different perspectives.
That's no secret, though different words are used to describe that. Keep the "A and B players," get rid of the "C players." No bones are made as to the darwinism inherent in GE companies. He also sold off low-growth commodity businesses that were still profitable. However, he notes that his severance packages were humane and nothing like the brutal ones that followed GE's example.Also, intelligent arrogance is always cultivated when trying to build elite groups. I hear that GE tries to avoid the stupid variety of arrogance, by not giving greater merit to people depending on what school they happened to attend.
You are making the faulty assumption that "quirky" stands for "less productive". The Internet itself was made - and made useful - by folks that could be considered "quirky". They were there first. The types who focused more on their outward appearance came later. The "cooling of the economy", or to put it more accurately, "total failure of the bullshit hype machine", reflects rather poorly on their contributions, while there are many who are quirky, knowledgable, and productive who still remain, and will be there when know-nothings like you come crawling back.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I've been on a lot of projects and there are two types of 'Quirky' developers that I've come across. The first is the long haired hippy type. They may have short hair, but the have the sole of someone from Oakland. These are the guys that no every odd little thing about their operating system of choice. They play D&D. They code like demons. Sometimes a project can't live without them. Usually nobody even notices they are gone. The second 'quirky' type is much more sublte. He's the one with the wierd laugh. He's probably annoying. He may smell but probably doesn't. Management usually hates him but every once in a while he become management. These are the guys who don't get the girl. They don't get the program. They couldn't tell you what the scores to the game were last weekend and they definetly don't even know what games were played last weekend. Their attention is on their code. They are the people who everybody else goes to for help. These are the people that other programmer's look up to. They are 'quirky' true. But they are programmers and developers and without fail if a company chases one of these guys away the company won't produce anything good after that. If you're Microsoft you may have a dozen or two dozen of these guys and may two or three hundred of the other type.
Fancy tricks like XP and Scrum are nice buzz words from people who don't code in the trenches anymore, but, if you scare away the chief guru then you might as well shut the door to the business. I've seen that happen at least three times.
There is a difference between 'Guru' and 'Wierdo' and the author should have known better.
Beware the wood elf!!!
I'm one of these "quirky" software engineers; I've a beard, absolutely don't wear ties at any cost, have unusual ideas, and am generally addressed as strange. I also don't like to wake up early and to work on the same thing for months without a real problem that requires a lot of work. But this doesn't mean that I don't like my job or that I will neither test nor document my code. Also, many and many times I was the last one in the computer room to work all nighttime on saturdays and sundays when the others were dancing somewhere, without anybody having to ask me to do so.
Like it or not, some of us are artists; you simply cannot make an artist work like everyone else. Force him, and you'll take him into frustration, making him totally improductive until he leaves for another company.
If you need creative thinking, you need creative people. Let us work as we can do, trust us, and we'll give back more than we're paid for.
Said that, the techie on the article was not a strange guy, he was only a bad one who didn't want to work.