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Comment by greenthrow | Hacker News Reader

The brilliant jerk thing is, in my experience, largely a myth. If someone is highly intelligent, they will realize acting like a jerk is not helpful and causes them problems, and they will correct that behavior. People who persist in acting like a rude child beyond college, in my experience, get credited as brilliant because people are intimidated by their attitude. But if you look at their actual accomplishments and delivered value, it will be unimpressive.

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Unfortunately not everyone we dislike is bad. I think this is a case of the fundamental attribution error: Most mean people aren't inherently mean, but are in circumstances that have made them so.

Yes, there are newgrad "rockstars" that can't play nice, and end up not being very productive. But there are also veteran engineers who have stayed at companies through 3 years of 100% attrition and are not super interested in listening to the opinion of the 4th junior backfill on some minor improvement to a system they architected and have been given 0 time to pay down technical debt on. Or maybe they are going through a messy divorce and the stress of it bleeds into their professional life.

I've gotten a lot of good out of finding such individuals, assuming they're reasonable people, and doing what I can to make their lives a little better.

This is so important!

Most people are not bad, and most of the time when two people don't get along, it's not because either of them are bad people. It's usually just a chemistry thing.

I'm not talking about people you just dislike, I'm talking about jerks. People who are rude and insulting. You completely mischaracterized my comment.

The one brilliant "jerk" I work with works mainly by himself. He's been isolated from everyone else. I say "jerk" because he doesn't seem like one to me, he's just disagreeble. I've noted in most working environments, especially remote ones, being tactful is of the upmost importance, which is odd in an engineering environment where having correct and efficient solutions would be the most important. Me being somewhat disagreeable, I actually like the guy because he doesn't beat around the bush. But alas, one person's honesty is another person's "rude" behavior.

> which is odd in an engineering environment where having correct and efficient solutions would be the most important.

Whenever people have to work together as a team, social skills become at least as important as technical ones.

That's why whenever I've interviewed job applicants, my main concern is "how well will they function on the team", not "do they have all the necessary skills". Assuming that someone is smart and likes to learn, skills can be taught. Fitting in on a team, though, cannot.

>Assuming that someone is smart and likes to learn, skills can be taught.

wish you can tell that to the current job market. Tons of jobs I wasn't even given time to talk to a technical reviewer for because it seems people right now just want the perfect candidate who will be productive from day zero.

I guess a person with low agreeableness will be more likely to "point out errors in the socially agreed convention". And therefore be seen as both brilliant, and as jerks.

There are different kinds of intelligence, and they often don't correlate to each other. A brilliant coder can absolutely be an emotional infant. It will handicap their career, for sure, but doesn't entirely preclude their ability to solve certain kinds of problems.

And, perhaps, there is a negative correlation due to selection.

Of the set of emotionally immature people, only those with excellent technical skills will remain in employment.

I don't think I've seen this be the case -- since there are quite a few crappy and/or poorly paying jobs (in comparison) that become desperate for workers, there's plenty of room for abusive and jerky people.

That's ignoring other broken parts of the system, such as nepotism.

"The brilliant jerk thing is, in my experience, largely a myth."

Not in my experience - I've met a few spectacular examples in my career - but I am in my 50s.

I think the "myth" part here is believing this person is a net gain in productivity

When in practice some optimization or other gains that might be taken by his expertise are offset by just making everybody worse at their jobs

I feel like their prevalence in tech has decreased in the last 10 years in the places I've worked. They are not allowed to maintain their bad behavior from my experience, or they are drummed out of the organization relatively quickly before they get the opportunity to be indispensable.

The "bitter old timer" doesn't happen as often anymore either, as people generally leave a job before they get too bitter due to the opportunities available.

There may be something to that - I don't think I've met anyone like that in the last 15+ years. Mind you, I might have got better at picking better to people to work with.

That's sad because the old timers generally have a lot of wisdom to share. They are usually also the ones at that stage in life where they are willing to mentor someone.

Their prevalence has decreased because there are so many other engineers. For every person who was programming in the 1990s, there are at least a hundred that started in the 2010s and many of the former struck it rich and retired. Mentorship can't scale to those numbers.

To clarify, I am speaking about seniority at a particular company combined with a bitterness toward that company because they are trapped. I think having older ICs is still incredibly valuable!

I wonder if this correlates in any way with improvements in mental health support (it's not perfect by a long shot, but it is better)

In my professional life I've been called a genius, and I've been called an asshole. I've never intentionally gone out of my way to be either, but it is what it is. A decade or so of struggling to get my points across without being an asshat about it I discovered I have ADHD.

Job security has always come with the ability to really deep dive into the things everyone else had trouble figuring out. Rejection sensitivity dysphoria seems to have been a likely culprit for the asshat side of things - I spent all this time figuring out the answer, and they aren't listening to me, these people are idiots!

With a bit of medication, a lot of self-help reading, and a healthy dose of cognitive behavioural therapy I'm so much better at interacting with people, and as a bonus I no longer have to bulldoze them into realising my ideas/fixes/etc are the better option (when they are, of course!). I've noticed people are no longer starting off on the defensive with their shields up to full whenever I pipe up now.

Just throwing a thought into the ether. I do acknowledge there's probably a lot of wise old timers retiring out of the system causing the decrease, as well as the points you made, but you'd think there'd be a few more new and upcoming greybeards taking their place.

I'm not saying it is for sure related, just wondering if anyone else can see a similar connection in their experiences?

Not trying to diagnose every bitter genius in a one-shot or anything either, just thinking if there is a correlation to former bitters becoming easier to work with after mental health treatments it feels like it should definitely be explored further. In my anecdotal experience the difference has been absolute night and day, work life is so much easier now.

In my experience in academia, it isn’t a myth at all. So much brilliant scholarship in my own field has been produced by people who are infamously ornery and prickly, and who don’t fit in with the departments they are at purely due to social reasons, not scholarly ones. It’s actually a problem that the modern tenure and grant system requires people to be very socially functioning and schmoozing.

oh yeah, it happens so much in college because college students aren't and usually can't be "interviewed" face to face. your submission is a combination of GPA, national test score, a very short essay (that may or may not be written by you), and whatever other clubs/accomplishments on the side you can convince the admissions office is noteworthy. Perfect environment for the brilliant jerk.

I'd say half get filtered out somehow from the work force (be it in interviews or because they choose to focus on Acedemia) but a lot will still get through given the bar of a graduate junior.

> If someone is highly intelligent, they will realize acting like a jerk is not helpful and causes them problems

Being intelligent does not mean someone is good at self-awareness.

Or, just doesn't care.

Yeah, it's also deeper than that.

Aptitude with a technology certainly correlates with intelligence, but it doesn't necessarily imply above-average intelligence.

Some people attain their skills through Herculean levels of hard work, rather than reading about it once and the information just clicking because of their excellent brains. (Though, in my experience, they tend to also be less arrogant than techno-prodigies, but YMMV.)

Self-awareness is, similarly, orthogonal to intelligence (as you correctly state).

I find it interesting that an assumption of equivalence (or, at least, strong correlation) is so prevalent among tech workers and their friends.

sometimes you just don't have the full context on the situation. I used to work with a systems dev manager who was notorious for getting mad, yelling, and questioning every little detail whenever an external team went to him for launch signoff. at first, I thought the guy was just an asshole. what I gradually figured out was that the application teams had been outright lying about designs, fabricating test results, and only involving him at the last second to launch a pile of trash on the critical infrastructure he was responsible for. this had been going on for years and resulted in several major outages.

sure, he could probably have been a bit more diplomatic instead of blowing his stack every time, but there's only so much a person can take.

>If someone is highly intelligent, they will realize acting like a jerk is not helpful and causes them problems

That doesn't appear to happen for other unhelpful behavior. Plenty of brilliant people with severe issues with all sorts of other criminal or self-destructive habits.

It's funny because that's how I think of most people going into management and above. They are smart, yet they will walk over you if you get in their way.

I'm not sure about that. It can at least be slow.

I was... maybe not brilliant, but pretty good. I also was at least a borderline jerk - arrogant and not very nice. It took me at least a decade out of college to get better.

My wife and kids think I'm on the autism spectrum, though I have never been diagnosed. Whether or not it's true, "people" is a language that it took me a long time to learn.

The increased visibility about Autism has helped in the workplace somewhat. When someone is able to be diagnosed, they are given the resources to help navigate the neurotypical world, and managers have been expected to adjust their communication styles for a neuro-diverse workforce.

Autistic people still are not given all of the opportunities to succeed, and training is uneven at best, but it's certainly on the right trajectory.

That said, please consider looking at confirming a diagnosis. If you are indeed on the spectrum, you may benefit from knowing and learning adaptive strategies.

You can be highly intelligent but also lack the social awareness / emotional intelligence, take Aspergers Syndrome for example.

You discount the idea that

1) there are Savant syndrome people out there who cannot catch and correct their problems

2) they seem disproportionately attracted to tech

So you're right that it's rare, but Tech does tend to be a very odd outlier for that kind of person.

Many times it's not like they are a complete jerk - I sometimes they are just not really caring how they come across. The thing is - if no one is ever disagreeing with them they can be quite pleasant to work with!

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