Are Quirky Developers Brilliant Or Dangerous?

jammag writes "Most developers have worked with a dude like Josh, who's so brilliant the management fawns over him even as he takes a dump in the lobby flowerpot. Eric Spiegel tells of one such Josh, who wears T-shirts with offensive slogans, insults female co-workers and, when asked about documentation, smirks, "What documentation?' Sure, he was whipsmart and could churn out code that saved the company millions, but can we please stop enabling these people?"

Comments

Lack of Documentation == dangerous

[yincrash]

Lack of documentation only chains you more to a developer. It makes it that much harder for someone else to maintain the code base.

Stop coddling your little genius

[Anita Coney]

When kids are recognized as being highly intelligent and gifted, parents, extended family, and teachers go out of their to coddle them. To treat them as special. To give them far greater leniency and independence than kids with normal intelligence.

Is it any shock that these kids grow up to think the rules don't apply to them?

Re:Stop coddling your little genius

[stevied]

There's a fine line, I think. All kids should certainly be taught respect for others and society, regardless of their talents.

On the other hand, subjecting smart kids to excruciatingly slow tuition along with everybody else because streaming is seen as un-egalitarian is a pretty effective form of torture, as is forcing them to endure bullying while trying to play team sports that they don't understand and are no good at, for example.

I'm willing to buy into the idea that all people are equal, but not that they are identical, and our culture increasingly cannot cope with people who are not exactly the same as everyone else. People with talent can serve society by developing that talent and using it to help society, if they're given the opportunity: otherwise they just end up broken and resentful.

Re:Dr. House Syndrome

[java killed the dino]

Shows like 'House' glorify it and apparently make people think it is okay to be an asshole as long as you get the job done.

It isn't?

Re: Seems ridiculous to me as well.

[guidryp]

I would say for every "freak" like this there must be a thousand+ that can code as well and are great to work with. This is just a egregious stereotype that would be quite hard to find in most modern Dev shops.

I have been doing SW dev for a living for about 15 years. Most of it large scale teams. I never saw anyone remotely close to this description and I have worked with some brilliant people. The best were humble, normal down to earth people. There has been a touch of arrogance, by some, but nothing like this.

I don't think the described person would last a week in the environments I work in.

Only in a small shop run by an idiot who won't pay for quality developers that are both talented and decent to work with, would you get this kind of freak and any dependency on him.

Real geniuses aren't arseholes

[David Gerard]

In my continued and repeated experience, the real geniuses aren't arseholes. They may be socially inept, but they aren't contemptuous about it.

Paul Graham talks about this in How to start a startup:

For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?

That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.

When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."

This technique doesn't always work, because people can be influenced by their environment. In the MIT CS department, there seems to be a tradition of acting like a brusque know-it-all. I'm told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky, in the same way the classic airline pilot manner is said to derive from Chuck Yeager. Even genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you have to make allowances.

It helped us to have Robert Morris, who is one of the readiest to say "I don't know" of anyone I've met. (At least, he was before he became a professor at MIT.) No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.

Brilliance is a three-edged sword?

[fugue]

They should be recognized as douchebags and fired on the spot.

Sounds like you want him fired because you don't get along with him. Perhaps you're jealous of his ability, such as it is? You needn't be--a good coder who can work with people is generally far more useful than a great one who can't.

Proper management and planning means you don't need a Josh on your team.

Proper planning means you'll anticipate every eventuality and be ready for it, which is of course impossible given that outside factors are basically random.

The guy should have been fired before he was ever allowed to become so integral to their solutions that getting rid of him would mean pain for the group.

You're confusing two issues here. He should clearly not have been allowed to become so integral to a sustainable solution, since he fucked up any hope of that. Firing him is one way to keep him from becoming integral to long-term solutions.

You might just as well advocate firing any manager who lets a Josh become involved in long-term projects. That would be just as correct. Clearly there are things Josh shouldn't be doing. A good manager will see that.

Actually, I like the idea of keeping Josh around just in order to test new managers. If they can't figure out how to use him effectively, fire them. He could be a truly invaluable resource to the company even if not a single piece of his code ever gets executed.