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Comment by FLT8 | Hacker News Reader

In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a little less high maintenance, but I agree that they will never achieve as much.

IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top echelon nerds may make the difference between success and hard fail.

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First:

> so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them

... is in my opinion basic management 101.

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Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never managed such people).

For example, at a former job, I worked under such people; they really liked me, because I was one of the few people who were actually capable of "understanding" their visions and make them understandable to less intelligent (but still smart) colleagues.

I really have a tendency to be liked by frustrated highly-smart people, both because I really love to learn from them and I think I am a decent person to talk to if you are really frustrated (on the other hand, much more "ordinary" people often reproach me for being "unapproachable", "having my head in the clouds", "always being so negative", "complicated to work with", ... :-) ).

Part of building an effective team is picking the right tool for the job, and your assertion that ‘genius’-wrangling is always justified / ‘the best thing to do’ is just plain wrong, no matter how much you try to justify it with…what basically sounds like Dunning Kruger self-flattery.

GP is right. So-called geniuses have their own problems. Problems that can’t just be ‘managed away’, just like you can’t completely ‘manage away’ some other types of poor fit. To say otherwise sounds like the sort of elite technical ability fetishism that, ironically, I’d expect from an IC.

If this has worked for you so far, it’s by coincidence.

> ... is in my opinion basic management 101.

Ever heard the one about how uncommon "common sense" often is? ;)

Were it a world where you were correct, but I am unsure how often that actually shows up.

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