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When Smart People Make Bad Employees
theodp writes "Writing for Forbes, CS-grad-turned-big-time-VC Ben Horowitz gives three examples of how the smartest people in a company can also be the worst employees: 1. The Heretic, who convincingly builds a case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons; 2. The Flake, who is brilliant but totally unreliable; 3. The Jerk, who is so belligerent in his communication style that people just stop talking when he is in the room. So, can an employee who fits one of these poisonous descriptions, but nonetheless can make a massive positive contribution to a company, ever be tolerated? Quoting John Madden's take on Terrell Owens, Horowitz gives a cautious yes: 'If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you'll be so late that you'll miss the game, so you can't do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you'll have a player that's so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.' Ever work with a person who's so good that he/she gets his/her own set of rules? Ever been that person yourself?"
Your first clue is that you refer to them as "users" :)
And boy are there some odd people among them!
But the majority just did what was expected, come up with novel ideas and ways to do things different and better.
It takes a special type of management/manager to point these brains in the right direction and when this happens it's great to see.
When the management isn't able to control these wizkids you will eventually have a problem but as they were between peers they usually were made to get back to producing what they were hired for.
The best you can do is to give them a real challenge and reward them with a bigger challenge.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Of course, he doesn't mention the smart person that shows up on time, does their work dutifully, and saves the company money by doing over and above what their job entails.
You know what's worse than a smart person who is lazy and doesn't show up on time? A dumb person that is lazy and doesn't show up on time. All of those traits he listed aren't qualities that solely belong to "smart people."
Many places don't want individual thinkers in all positions, they want 'team players,' where team player means someone who shuts up and does what they're told. The larger the company is, the fewer outspoken people they want.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
If your solution really is superior, but implementing it and maintaining it is beyond the abilities of your team, then it is not workable. As the smarter person, it is your responsibility to figure out what that limit is, and stay under it.
If you can't do this, then you aren't quite as gifted as you think you are.
I have found that smart people are really bad at simple, repetitive, boring tasks.
They get bored, start daydreaming, and make mistakes.
I find that they automate away the problem, and then spend their time doing whatever they want while pretending to work.
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I seem to remember a time when tech culture was better tolerated, if misunderstood. Post dot-com era, the old conformist culture has reasserted itself with it's fucked up, ultimately self-defeating expectations, where feelings matter more than fact, process matters more than results, and blind loyalty matters more than earned respect. This is the primary reason technical people run into trouble at work.
Sure, there are assholes in every field, but the best technical people are rarely if ever socially well-adapted. Their minds are world-focused, not people-focused. This is what allows them to do their jobs well in the first place. Their caustic (to non techs) attitudes manifest because they are often focal points within their organizations that end up interfacing expectation (often hollywood trained) with technical realities. PHBs don't give a shit about the details, they "hired you to make it work, so make it work" even while they refuse to grant you required resources/time/training because they lack proper understanding in the first place (and often lack the desire to learn the basics so they can manage properly). Being less people-oriented already, that pressure often blows off in lots of dark, satirical sarcasm, one-liners, and other nuggets of wisdom that, more often than not, hit too close to home for insecure management and coworkers. Instead of encouraging hyper-sensitivity, culture in general needs to toughen up if it wants to be effective in solving problems. In short, many techs would have better attitudes if they were listened to a bit more (no I do not mean despotic deference). They will never be warm, people-pleasers, but, trust me, you don't want them that way.
I suggest all the would-be well-this-is-how-real-'professionals'-like-me-work posters stop and think about how stressful their situations are and/or how good they really are before they preach to those they'd dismiss as anti-social malcontents who need to get with it. Neuro-typicals make mediocre techs at best, that's why they hire us in the first place.
And thereby do we traverse the tortuous path from intelligence to wisdom...
He's actually very smart, but he's always taking the quickest, dirtiest route to the goal. If a hack will do it, he'll do it and make that part of any critical process without a second thought to architecture, interdependencies or anything like that. If a manual workaround is faster, that's what he'll do - or mostly instruct others to do. For that he's known as a problem solver and is in high regard with management, which means nobody gets to rein him in.
What they don't see is that every system runs like crap and is impossible to understand because there's weird kludges upon kludges upon kludges. Many interdependencies are completely irrational, you're afraid to touch anything to break it. That all the manual workarounds are choking the efficiency of everyone else, which are of course blamed when the endless manual steps and "remember this, check that, copy this field to that then save, alter status, execute this job" gets too complicated, error prone and slow. And he's mostly oblivious to this himself, he praises how the quickfixes help us even when quickfixes are the reason it's such a huge and complicated process to begin with. What's saving him is that nobody can do better, because everything is such a clusterfuck they don't understand anything and so full of special cases and other mine fields that the answers are bound to be wrong.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you're that smart, then you find a way to approach the problem constructively. At risk of sounding like a PHB myself, learn to "manage upwards".
I've worked for a (newly promoted) manager who was *absolutely clueless* about what my team did for him, and what our role was supposed to do. He was absolutely incompetent to manage us, and provided no "leadership" that was recognizable as such to my group. He was a business analyst trying to get experience in the technical side of the division for a run at a higher management position.
So, we educated him. And not by undermining him, making him look foolish, and getting him replaced: by presenting our case at every opportunity, by highlighting the risks and benefits of various projects we wanted to work on, by basically pushing him and making it look like he was leading us. He grew as a manager as a result, and we ended up being the guys with a good reputation for working well with customers & other teams, and coming up with excellent solutions, and all of us got promotions for our efforts, because this manager realized that we were helping him and making his department look good.
We could have gone the other way, and bitched about him non-stop, and been the heretics. But it would have simply burned career bridges for us, and turned the clueless boss into a jerk, and we would've ended up drawing the same pay we started with. If your entire management chain is absolutely, profoundly clueless, then your workplace is doomed, and you should seek employment elsewhere. If it's one or two clueless managers, learn how to deal with them and you'll make a couple friends for life.
There is no reason to be a jerk, ever. But a lot of really smart people get put into positions that are downright miserable simply because they are the smartest person in the room, get frustrated, and then turn into jerks.
A lot of smart people don't understand how the world works, how much humans are dictated by a herd mentality and it comes back to bite them in the ass. For example, an extremely bright recent graduate gets a job at a company staffed mainly engineers who are 5 to 10 years older than them. The young, smart fellow may think "if I work hard and showcase my talents I will soon get ahead". Sadly, the world does not work that way. People who have been working for 5 - 10 years in a job don't like to see people younger than them master it in 1 or 2. What they hate even more is having to work for a somebody younger than themselves. If you think we live in a meritocracy you've never worked in an organization with more than 2 levels of management.
I've seen many young, brilliant engineers apply themselves, get chewed up by the political machine, and become abrasive assholes simply because they don't understand "its not what you know, its who you know". My advice to them is to quit the job and start their own company. Never work for someone dumber than yourself. If you think you know everything, prove it.
The worst people that I have worked with had AMAZING people skills.
They could convince, seemingly rational people, of almost anything... regardless of glaring logical holes or inconsistencies.
They seemed to have some sort of narcissistic disorder and usually would trend projects towards whatever outcome would earn them the most dough or gratification with little regard to the success of the outcome.
I would take a few non-communicative geeks over a boatload of these asshats any day of the week, but then I do not work in Marketing so what the hell
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