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

[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.

Risk Analysis and good management

[sien]

I've only worked in a few places, so I've not seen many circumstances, but this is my take.
Most of us, the committed ones, who are reasonable with people, will be quite able and produce good code and do good things.
However, the ones who do spectacular things tend to be quirky and a bit crazy. It's my guess that a lot of times these people aren't that great, but that once in a while they will do things that 'normal' people won't. They are the ones who code almost non-stop for six months to produce a first class engine. Would anyone describe what Linus did to start the kernel as normal ?
Normal people tend not to do this. We have normal interests and try to live balanced lives.
To quote Henry Rollins:
"Want a good body? Work at it. Want to be a success? Work at it. Want to be truly exceptional? Be a touch insane...You need a little bit of insanity to do great things."
So, if you hire a quirky person, be aware that he might save your shop, or kill it and be totally ready to sack the person. And that's what these people did. On the other hand, if you have a few engineers, a few risky bets that might just pay off bigtime are probably a really good idea. And of course, as with anyone else, keep track of them. Very few of us work well in a vacuum.

That really does depend...

[trilucid]

The question posed is *really* overly broad:

'is there still room in a company for a quirky 'guru', or are projects so large now by necessity team-based development rules.'

I'm a developer, and always will be. I've worked on projects ranging from simple contact managers to the actual Bank of America telephone banking system (I'm sorry to say, 99% written in VB 6.0) via a company in Atlanta.

Here's a little secret about the BOA project. The core development team is 6 people. Yep, that's right, *six* people to manage a project that allows millions of people to do their banking by phone. Those people are developers; there are three primary guys above them, one dev manager, and two project managers. (Well, one more guy, the VP over that division...)

Now, that kinda puts things in perspective. The "apparent size" of a project in no way guarantees how many dudes it takes to get the job done. Likewise, some "very small" projects end up requiring a whole lot of coders to whip out new releases. It all depends.

Now, about the guru bit... with the BOA project, there's one guy (good friend of mine still) who's the "guru" of that team if you will. He codes VC++ and VB, and is a freakin' maniac at it. The team would be seriously hurt if he up and left (or got hit by a Marta bus) one day. Even so, nobody minds this, because he does a damn fine job.

I think you also have to consider the fact that even in teams with a guru of sorts leading at the helm, most often he/she isn't the uber-asshole elitist coder the media would like us to believe. Sure, he may not get along very well with folks down at the local bar, but he *does* get along with the developers and project people at his job pretty darn well in most cases that I've seen.

Room? Yes, there'll always be room. It all depends on the personality merits of who you've got.

Re:That really does depend...

[The Cat]

Here's a little secret about the BOA project. The core development team is 6 people. Yep, that's right, *six* people to manage a project that allows millions of people to do their banking by phone. Those people are developers; there are three primary guys above them, one dev manager, and two project managers. (Well, one more guy, the VP over that division...)

Six developers, four managers.

Wow, no wonder it costs $12 to cash a check.

Quirky "guru"?

[Jerf]

"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.)

Quirky-ness not always appreciated

[Telecommando]

Here where I work, we had an electrical design engineer who everyone referred to as "ZZ", due to his ZZTop style beard and long hair that hung down below his waist. Strange fellow, liked to talk about UFO abductions, Harleys and why fat women were better in bed. Helluva engineer, though. He'd look at a diagram for a minute or two, then whip out a pencil and start marking it up. Deleting unnecessary parts, changing values, adding parts... When he was done it was usually simpler, cheaper and more solidly designed. He was respected among all in the engineering department. Whenever someone would come up with a new circuit change they were always told, "run it past ZZ first." His own designs were often unique and innovative. It might take you a while to figure out what he was doing but when you did you just kinda sat back and said, "Wow!"

When we had a management shakeup a few years ago, where it was decided to shuffle all the managers around to different departments, his new manager took an immediate dislike to him. He called ZZ a "goddamn filthy hippie freak" in a staff meeting and ordered him to either show up clean shaven the next day or be fired. Of course, ZZ declined. Actually, ZZ was quite fastidious in his appearance. His beard and hair probably took an hour to comb out and braid everyday.

The manager didn't fire him, but did do his best to make his life a living hell. Finally after about a year, ZZ got fed up with it and left.

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.

Kuttner's Gallagher Stories (Robots Have No Tails)

[Nova Express]

One of the best science fictional examples of this are Henry Kuttner (as Lewis Padgett's) Gallagher stories (collected in Robots Have No Tails), about a guy who's a genius inventor, but only when he's completely drunk! He gets sloshed, builds something, passes out, and when he comes to, he had no idea what it was he built! Funny stuff, and highly politically incorrect today. Anyway,even Kuttner knew that Gallagher couldn't work in a corporate environment (even one extropalated from the 1940s!), so he has him as a consultant.

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...