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

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: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?

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.