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As a manager, a big part of our job is to mitigate risk and single points of failure. If enabling someone to work like this increases risk and creates SPOF in our teams, we're screwing up letting them do it.

Absolutely agree. This point however is generally only understood by a previously engineer-turned-manager.

> As a manager, a big part of our job is to mitigate risk and single points of failure.

No, your job as a manager is to understand the trade-offs of taking such risks and make a decision that fits your situation.

I.e. your competitor may capture your market with a single engaged risky engineer before you can produce anything usable with your best practice low risk team. Once they capture the market, they can stabilize later and hire your team, because you went out of business.

That is one of the very important points a lot of people are missing here, and a key argument of the article: a fast rendering engine was a requirement for quake to be as popular as it was and it was a product of a brilliant engineer doing something innovative.

More often then not, innovation comes from a reduced number of people doing things differently, and it's very hard to assemble a team of engineers which is willing or even capable of doing this sort of work.

This also comes back to the "decision shielding" from working different hours: it's very common for managers or people averse to risks to try to stick to solutions they know, even if they are suboptimal or do not fit the problem very nicely.

Anyone capable of doing more will soon realize they are spending most of their time solving mismatches between what solution was used/implemented and the problem they were trying to solve. If they don't find an alternative or a way around these limitations, they will leave.

With real rock stars, or movie stars, the manager of course reports to the star and serves at their disposal.

Manager may have some challenging performances lined up and the creative operator has to really toe the line, but the purpose of the team is to support that to the best of their ability.

Anything less, and the desired expression of talent might be dampened. If this is too severe expect the star to move away toward a more functional arrangement.

Your job as a manager is to make corporate life tolerable for your minions. The storyline you present here sounds very dehumanising, and in my experience all of my worst managers have been like that.

But as you said, there's a time and place for the brilliant IC, and that's usually the very very early stages of a business.

There are two kinds of ICs that I like to call capability guys and capacity guys. Capability guys can bring new skills into the organisation, and capacity guys can do the bread-and-butter work that actually pays the bills. You need to balance the two. Make sure the capacity guys benefit from learning the new skills and make sure the capability guys don’t go off on a tangent, and it can be a very enriching experience for everyone.

What does IC mean?

Individual Contributor

individual contributor. i.e. not a manager or leader.

> there's a time and place for the brilliant IC, and that's usually the very very early stages of a business

I definitely agree with this with a slight alteration....early stages of a project

Ehhh... everyone is brilliant in the early stages of a project.
Coming up with a fantastic green fields design isn't hard and represents a fraction of a percentage of the overall work.
Give me a solid engineer who can deal with all the legacy cruft and still produce a maintainable piece of software.

I'd offer a third option: Early stages of a product.
The hyper-productive antisocial back room whiz kid is perfect for an R&D role. They can launch off solo and come back a few weeks later with a working prototype to prove the viability of a new product line. Then, before they get bored and stop being productive, you send them off on another deep space mission to invent something else.
All the while, you have a team of less flashy but more dependable and cooperative engineers taking the prototypes and building sustainable systems and marketable products out of them.

I need that role. In a week I turn out what takes a team several months and many times they've already spent that many trying to show any visible progress.
I've done the impossible since I was in college. Still am. I'm resented by peers. Feared by less competent managers. I can't be controlled.
I have a deep sense of integrity. I refuse to compromise my morals. I will not be forced to implement anything I believe could be used for unethical purposes. I won't bury the truth.
I won't keep my mouth shut if blame is cast inappropriately. I will not see people thrown under the bus. I work too hard. I'm an over achiever. Others start to believe they are looking bad by comparison. I'm held back by them.
I work all night. I get 'er done. I care. I listen. I empathize. I'm hated.
I'm not a team player because I am able to do all the jobs but focus what I do best. I'll help you do your job better but I won't do it for you.
I won't tolerate lies. I have high standards for myself and my team. I won't fall in line.
People assume I'm arrogant but I always under promise and over deliver.
I'm lost.
There is no place for me.
I'm alone.

Sounds like you need to start your own company where you can call the shots and surround yourself with like-minded people.

Look for consulting work or start you own business. If you are difficult and not a team player, you are going to have a hard time in teams regardless of your ninja rockstar abilities. But there are plenty of opportunities for a sole developers where you might thrive.

Honestly, it sounds you're both brilliant and a bit lacking in people skills at the same time. Most people are decent and try to do the right thing, so if they do something questionable it's usually because there's another (not-questionable/good) thing that they're trying to achieve. Try to objectively understand people's reasons for doing things before you reach a conclusion about their behavior, it will go a long way in making you feel less alone.

It must hurt to feel so lost and alone. I'm sure what you wrote is an honest description of how you feel, but it's highly biased. Impossible for it not to be, mind you. Without talking to your peers, or watching you interact with them, it's impossible to say if it's actually your IQ that they resent you for, or if there's something else going on. For instance, if EQ is low (compensation for high IQ), then you may not even be able to see hurtful actions that you've taken towards them for which they resent you, rather than jealousy of your brilliance.
(btw might look into Aspergers/ASD)

Go see a therapist.

You need to grow up. It’s hurting and will hurt like hell, but it’s the only way. You are not your work, you got that illusion and higher sense of self because you knew that’s the only thing you have to offer, now you’re starting to realize it’s a dead end.
Time to let go.

There's a bunch of contradictions in this post, and honestly it seems like a troll/joke post.
You're conflating lies/truth, empathy/hate, peers/team, productivity, etc all together, it's bananas.
But the basic gist is that it sounds like you're not suitable for larger companies at all. You should limit yourself to companies smaller than 50 people.

This reminds me of a manifesto, like the hackers manifesto that showed up years ago. Maybe we can call it the Overachiever Engineer manifesto?

Have you tried coming down off your high horse in the rarified stratosphere and acted like a normal and humble human being? Because you are either on a team of retards or you have an unhealthy ego.

In some degree, I believe everyone is in that same boat. But I think it is unusual to mix your 'morals' with your work. This indicates that you like discussing random stuff with people at work.
I mean, avoiding allocating memory unnecessarily is not related to moral nor ethics.
And you know.. just because you have a moral opinion doesn't mean you MUST point out divergence with others, when they pronounce their world view. I really find it unusual to point out "morals" in a topic like this one.

It’s easy for people to reflect on the brilliance without the casualties they sometimes cause.

Overly dramatic language aside, what else are engineers that come into a place that isn’t rife with greenfield opportunities expecting?
Most software work out there is babysitting. Oh I know, I know we’re rockstars inside.
In the early days, as the story goes, one person shipped a bunch of features. This part of the anecdote is underdeveloped, IMO. Hazy past recollections formed after emotionally processing a big shift.
Was someone bringing this up before manager and rockstar bailed? Sounds like the team and upper management as a hole lacked foresight, and this is an after the fact realization.
It’s a TEAM effort after all. Poor organization isn’t the fault of one brilliant eng or manager.

> Most software work out there is babysitting.
Yes, of a sort. Green fields are rare, and with the way things are today your picking up a massive pile of pre written infrastructure and libraries that you hardly look at (until they are a problem).
The rockstar mentality is not wrong, but some days you need to pick up the pack and walk up the mountain too.
The problem starts at the interview. We give people coding tests to see if they can produce, but that's less than 10% of the technical side of the job. Really we should be giving code reading tests. What does this do, is there anything wrong with it, is there anything you would change and so on.

Even most "green fields" these days tend to be fields where the grass is torn out, some re-landscaping is done, and some new grass that is a lot like the old grass is planted.

Why not just revert the rework? If no one has any context you're probably better off sticking with what you had even if the rework had good intentions.

Undoing someone else's well intentioned work can be viewed as passive aggressive behavior.

If they're still around sure, but the engineer in this case had left and wasn't around to maintain the work anymore

I think they were referring to reverting the work of the employee that left that put the organization in a bind, not someone still on the team.
I had the same thought—revert the changes to get the rest of the team back on track. The problem could be that the changes could be over the course of many commits, so rolling back is complicated and almost as difficult as moving forward.

Yep multiple commits over a long period of time + different services (microservices).
Was possible to revert, but the work needed to be done. The biggest mistake was letting this singular person take control and not let anyone else in on it. Reverting would have been a big effort as well.

That’s only if you don’t discuss it first.
Well intentioned work can still be bad or not usable or not the thing the code needs right now.

IC = ?
edit: IC = individual contributor (just found that answered somewhat deeper in another subthread)

“Individual Contributor”, as opposed to “Manager”.
The term is often used in reference to the engineer career track where you don’t become a manager but instead focus on technical leadership, but more generally it refers to being a leaf on the org tree.

Individual contributor.
In contrast to a lead, manager, or pm.
The IC is usually the person who actually writes software/code. (The bulk of employees at a software company are ICs)

PM is typically an IC too unless they are directly managing others.

I'm a little confused by your comment. If his 48 hour rewrite of the codebase didn't end up working out well (and how could it really), why not just rollback to where you were previously? That way you wouldn't need to spend 6 months making it work?

It was an on-going rewrite that consistent of multiple PRs against multiple services (micro-services arch).
The 48 hour push was to "finish" which didn't end up happening.
Reverting was possible, but would have been just as much work as pushing forward (since the rewrite needed to happen anyway).