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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?"
Here is a link for those of you unfamiliar.
The best people I've worked for were never the smartest. They combined high enough intelligence with wisdom. They were humbled by time. They had learned people skills. And if they had any kind of self-awareness, they were shamed by how much they had acted like assholes when they were younger.
Gregory House. Need anyone say more?
I'm thankfully not smart enough to qualify, but I've worked with both Heretics and Jerks. One of the really nice things I love about my current workplace is their clear and very explicit "no brilliant jerks" policy. "For us, the cost to effective teamwork is too high."
The only time I've ever interviewed someone, walked out of the interview absolutely sure we had to hire them, and been wrong was when we hired one of the three smartest guys I've ever worked with -- who proved to be entirely ineffective in getting anything done because "we have to change everything because you're all a bunch of idiots!"
That's because I'm surrounded by Morons who don't even know the capital of Elbonia!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
A slight variation on the first one is the “embittered moral drain”. These are people who are brilliant, but for whatever reason have basically committed career suicide. They become bitter and angry, and although they still do their job, they make a huge deal out of every minor mistake made by the company. This kind of thing spreads to those around them and it can really take the fun out of work, which kills productivity.
A forth type I might add is the “unfocused hacker”. These are the guys who treat their job like their hobby. They focus on the stuff that interests them, and ignore the stuff that’s “boring”. They never ask for clarification and just make assumptions when the requirements aren’t clear because they’d rather code than type up an email. If tasked to build a car in 4 months.. they’d spend 3 months designing the coolest, most elegant windshield wiper you’d ever seen.. and then spend the remaining 1 month bodging an old tricycle to meet the requirements. These guys are usually skilled, but unless you keep a really tight leash on them, they make a huge mess.
I’ve also run into the inverse of this list on quite a few occasions “The Dedicated Idiot.”. These are the guys who are really nice people, willing to put in extra time and energy, good team players, but have the slight problem of not being able to actually do their job. No one wants to get rid of this guy he’s really trying but damn is his code terrible and full of bugs and never on time and never quite meets the spec.
Also, what was up with the mixing of “he” and “she”. I don’t know why, but I found this very distracting.
I think there was a time when that was true, but not really any longer. IT isn't quite the basement-dwelling, bitter social outcast draw it once was. Not to sound immodest, but I like to think I'm really good at interacting with users. And for the most part, I feel like my co-workers are pretty good at it too. We have a lot of friends in other departments.
On the other hand, maybe I'm just fooling myself.
I have always been the most important person on any team, but no one seems to notice...
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
> 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?
Why is a person a bad employee if they are willing to point out poor leadership in their company? Isn't that a positive contribution to the company, if the bosses can be replaced with better leadership? The article seems to think that pointing out flaws in the company that can be corrected are ok, but pointing out flaws in leadership shouldn't normally be allowed. I guess this article is directed at PHB's...
Your first clue is that you refer to them as "users" :)
If they don't want smart people then stop forcing people to have 4-6+ year degrees to get jobs and have more on the job training.
I've been that jerk in the past -- the guy that everyone listened to because I was right and came up with really good software, but people hated dealing with me and basically shut up when I was in the room. I slowly discovered that if I stopped acting like a jerk, people still respected me, but they stopped putting up a fight. People even went out of their way to help me. It was a lot easier to do my job, and I'm convinced that I was actually able to produce better code because of the reduced number of bureaucratic headaches.
I wish I'd figured it out earlier.
Hmm, on the other hand, I was asked to do more stuff because people were less afraid of me. So I guess... be careful what you wish for?
Building Better Software
That job was sucking the life out of me.
It's not that I'm particularly good at what I do.
It's that the place was dis-functional.
The only things that got done were through back channels.
With the inevitable outcome.
Spaghetti code sucks, spaghetti management is worse.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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."
I know, i was thinking, all smart people fall under these 3 categories because the person who came up with it is a complete retard. Can't treat people as individuals so i have to generalize the "smart ones" into stupid bins that don't really fit them or what they do. I guess i've never heard of a smart person who has enough social skills to keep his mouth shut when it's important to and get his work done on time and be aware of his surroundings enough to know when disaster is going to strike and even comes up with plans so he can look like a hero every time? Right, cuz you hire smart retards because that's what you're comfortable with.
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."
You'd be amazed how many people are oblivious to design.
But in this case, I think AC is not really talking about design, but a mental cantrip where you use the far better modelling system of your brain rather than a wall covered in sticky notes that some people prefer, in order to some up with a truly holistic design.
I do the same, and find it baffling when other cannot do it.
My grandfather was a draftsman for Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) back in the day before computers. How did he get his job? After applying he was given an IQ test. He was considered smart enough for the job and they taught him how to draw airplane parts. These days you'd get sued six ways from Sunday if you gave someone an IQ test as a pre-requisite for employment.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
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
So you have a brilliant employee who is unhappy because he sees how things go wrong and is disempowered. If you really want to keep him, then maybe it would be better to cut down on micromanagement and enable employees to make decisions. Or you have someone whose abilities you are not using fully - well that could be seen as an opportunity rather than a problem.
He's right, that once the employee has shared his unhappiness with 50 friends he's not likely to change his mind anymore. You shouldn't let that happen in the first place - listen to complaints and fix problems. Having the mindset that any employee issue can only be dealt with as a personnel matter - that's a good way to create problem employees.
I think there was a time when that was true, but not really any longer. IT isn't quite the basement-dwelling, bitter social outcast draw it once was... ....On the other hand, maybe I'm just fooling myself.
Of course you are fooling yourself. Everyone in our IT shop is near-ASD; one more symptom each and we'd all be eligible for disability.
Now don't be moddin' me flamebait, bucko: this works out just fine and we're all pretty chuffed with it.
OCD and high IQ are perfect for the IT work place and we all get along quite well, thank you, when left alone to play with our systems and networks. No one's bothered by the given examples; most think that the heretic would be a fool to think any different, the flake is just ADD/ADHD and just needs a PM to keep on track, and the jerk is really just NLD (possibly Tourette's if he has a tick) and doesn't mean anything nasty by what he says. Besides, it's all quite entertaining as long as there is lots of work to do and the pay checks keep coming in.
As for me, I'm just a freakin' ASD rainbow.
The great thing is, everyone is bright and all dive deep into the knowledge well. The answer to any problem is close at hand. Also, everyone has coping strategies and has learned how to communicate depending on who is being dealt with.
This is just business as usual. ;->
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.
Yeah, I've yet to run into a "normal" person.
I think Temple Grandin said something like: if we were all neural-typical [er.. normal], we'd still be sitting in the dark in a cold cave having lots of conversations.
Thanks goodness for Asperger's.
BTW: there is some science to communication with "eccentrics". In particular, look up "social stories". You have to modify it a bit to use in the work place but this method works surprisingly well with the Ferengi as well as the tech-droids.
I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Perhaps I should elaborate.
I never said anything about forcing bad tools on anyone; that came from your mind, not mine. I'm sorry someone did that to you in the past, but that's irrelevant here. You're projecting, seeing pointy-haired bosses everywhere.
What I will say is that anyone who says "because I like this one OS/development environment/whatever for tasks that I happen to be good at, any other OS/development environment/whatever is always inferior. And so are the people who prefer anything that isn't my pet whatever." That's a hater. And that's someone that doesn't understand that THEIR pet tool is not universal. One of the characteristics of skilled developers and IT people is that they recognize that there is not now, nor ever shall be, one set of software tools that is universally superior in all environments for all purposes. They also recognize that widely-used tools are good for something, otherwise they never would have become widely-used. Another sign of willful ignorance: "If I don't see a good use for something, it doesn't exist, and never did."
As a corollary, sometimes there are excellent reasons why tools that aren't ideal for a specific task are used. Interoperability, licensing constraints, expense, the ability to hire more people who know how to use a wide-spread general-purpose software development tool vs. a hyperspecialized tool... these are all factors that are important in the big picture which a developer or IT person might not see, or might dismiss because it's not their personal problem to solve. It's seldom malice which leads to a directive that "we must use X to make this". Good companies expose those reasons internally, of course, but exposed or not, the reasons are always there.
Or, to restate, anyone who says "All Apple stuff is crap" or "Windows is garbage" or "GCC is the perfect compiler for everything" is willfully ignorant, and is looking to start arguments. Why would anyone hire someone who deliberately wallows in ignorance?
Holding customers in contempt... there's no defense for that. Ever. Customers may not have the extensive education necessary to produce a product, but they're the ones who have to use it, and they're the ones you have to convince to pay for it. The customer is not always right, but they're always the ones you have to take care of (or you don't get paid). A company that doesn't have sympathy for its customers (particularly a company that makes consumer-focused software) is doomed to failure. It's also a personal failing; any time you assume someone who isn't skilled with a given sophisticated tool is an "idiot", you can bet they're trash-talking you and everyone else around you behind their backs. These are the team-breakers. Not cool, not acceptable, not hired.
You accuse me of being pure-dollar. Hardly. The overriding theme here is that I believe that hateful prima donnas do not produce good products, that being a bad person does not make up for good talent, and that the care and feeding of a single superstar at the direct expense of everyone around them is just not worth it. I also feel that treating a hostile-but-talented worker preferentially is unethical, as it directly rewards bad behavior and directly harms others exhibiting good behavior. If I were pure-dollar, I'd be stating "we're not here to hold hands and sing Kum By Ya, and NeckBeard here writes the best code, so suck up his tirades, you average workers". Exactly the opposite. I believe that teams produce winning products, not superstars, and that whenever you have to choose between the single superstar and the hardworking regular team, you choose the team.
Never coddle a jackass, no matter how talented. And may the Flying Spaghetti Monster help you if a jackass working for you comes into contact with an "idiot" customer and behaves... predictably. Your company and your jackass will instantly become a YouTube star, and not in a good way.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Your first clue is that you refer to them as "users" :)
Yeah, instead of "lusers" or "id10t errors".
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009