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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?"
The dude's an ass, like Taco pulling this troll, not "quirky" - look up the bloody dictionary sometime.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
why are the mutually exclusive?
Mutually exclusive? It's not a XOR, it's an OR operator. Make sure your slashdot licence is on my desk by wednesday.
I worked at a large Canadian bank where they had a programmer like this guy. They let him come in at noon and work 'til whenever he wanted. He had the long hair and the smell and he named all his computers (he had four servers at his desk) after planets. It took me 1 microsecond to figure out he was an a$$hole. I was sent to learn how to install this Windows service he had developed some years earlier - he obviously didn't want me to know how it worked. It was installed on every single system that talked to the mainframe at this bank. He proceeded to try to confuse me by rolling his chair from one server to the next while he ran through this complicated installation of products (it relied on a bunch of other, properly configured software). Unfortunately for Dingus, I'm a pretty darned good shoulder surfer, having worked with Aholes like him before. Five minutes later, I walked out of his hovel, he with a smile on his face thinking he'd confused me and that I'd be back, me with the knowledge of how his software worked. A couple of days later, I showed my manager how his software was logging the userid and passwords (in the Windows Event Log) of every supervisory user who logged on to the systems that made use of his software. The excrement hit the fan!
You stop being a quirky genius soon as you declare yourself as one. Since then you're just a wannabe poser.
Yeah, and what if the owner of the company declares you one, and it happens in more than one company, and you regularly live outside the traditional chain of command of the company, answerable only to the owners?
And the vast multitudes of people living their lives wrapped in the organizational framework you conceived for them, day after day, month after month, year after year, focusing entirely on what you decided was important long ago and ignoring anything that doesn't appear on their screen as though it didn't exist in the world... their significance just dwindles away?
We're just wannabe posers. Who happen to run your lives in ways that you will never, ever understand, and you will never even acknowledge us, let alone be grateful.
I should have gone into medicine...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Do you have an equal share of the company as the owners? No? Then I hope the pats on the head are worth it.
You're the sort of guy who thinks having the deed to the Mona Lisa is the reward. I'm the sort of guy who thinks having painted the Mona Lisa is the reward. I could give a shit about the pats on the head... I draw comfort from knowing that my influence reaches out with invisible fingers to wrap the globe like a giant fist and keep my stupid, ungrateful little children safe and warm. That is my reward, and no bankster will ever deprive me of it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth