In the real world, the "Weird Nerd" rarely checks all of these boxes, let alone most of them. I bet a lot of people will read this and identify as the Weird Nerd despite checking none of the boxes. That's the nature of articles that leave out the nuance and instead give us the most idealized view of a noble scientist who was a victim of the system. It leaves an opening for everyone to feel like they were a victim of the system.
That's why this problem is far more complicated than articles like this would lead you to believe. Many of the "Weird Nerd" people out there aren't perfect scientists or engineers unfairly shunned by the system. Many of them have real flaws of varying degrees that would require a lot of guidance and mentoring even within a perfect system. And it's not easy! In fact, it can be very taxing on teams to work around the quirks of your average (non Noble Prize winning, like this article) Weird Nerd even if they can produce good output, which is why so many companies select for Boring Nerds instead.
I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that they never need to become managers, if they don’t want.
I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.
Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.
It's not surprising that lots of people opt out or wash out of this system because the expectations don't match the formal preparation for it.
Let's forget the Weird Nerds for a minute and look at the following situation: a person W is technically savvy enough to have accomplished a big chunk of project X. Say, 90%. And then there is a 10% left which takes as much work. So management hires people from a consultancy to pick up the 10%. Except that these guys don't write much code. They are adept at finding their way into technical management at light speed and want to push what should be their work back to W, while doing the bare minimum otherwise. Now W has more work than before, because he has been pushed into politics. At the very least, he will need to communicate to his colleagues that they need to pick up the slack for real. With some luck, W will find a nice way to do that, but that's the kind of problem he is ill-equipped to handle.
There is something in this article which is overlooked in these comments: people like Katalin Karikó are often under a lot of pressure to perform. They can have crippling debts, or be supporting an elderly parent or relative. Or fear something as life-wrecking as a deportation. They don't get the luxury of being "average", because there are more desirable "average" candidates than them: people who speaks with the right accent or in the right cultural code.
Outside laboratory science, the expectation to bring in funding is not as strong. You don't need much money to do research, and grants are not as readily available. As far as the administration is concerned, if you do your teaching duty without too many issues, you can use the rest of your time as you see fit. Academic politics revolve more around personal relationships with the tenured people at your department.
The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no one can get along.
There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU...
Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
Individual efforts are completely different. A programmer like Notch can produce Minecraft on his own and then just get help to push it into a maintained product. This happens all the time, but you can’t produce that easily (and definitely not consistently) at the big corp level.
If you have no financial constraints? In what world do you spend massive amounts of money to mitigate people being "weird"?
I’d argue that it’s not due to communication costs. The more you attempt to parallelise a problem the harder communication gets.
No matter if one is "weird nerd" or not
And frankly, nobody's irreplaceable. If you're #1 in the world, but casually drop racist and sexist slurs, odds are that the #2 expert in the world isn't that much worse than you, nor #3..#10.
Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
Yes - but a lot of Weird Nerds aren't willing to be cordial. I said in another comment that I think that one of the reasons they find their home online is because online, others can walk away from their comments when they need a break from them; something that's much harder to do at work, when you're face to face with them in a meeting, or at the watercooler, or in the bathroom where they followed you to continue their argument.
> Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
> I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
I don't think we're disagreeing. Certainly the way we're molded in our formative years is hard to break out of. That wns tend to be freethinkers is also true, after all their differences in thinking are what set them apart from regular members of society. I'm positing that freethinkers have a much better chance of breaking the mold than regular people.
I'm not sure of your tone in this conversation though. Are you perhaps uncomfortable with individuals who think differently from you? That is often the root of intolerance my friend.
Well, no it isn't. That was the point of the top comment in the chain: the commenter worked for Weird Nerd, found them insufferable, told everyone they were insufferable and that working for them sucked, and as a result the Weird Nerd's career has tanked because no one new will work with them. There really aren't many cases where you can Go It Alone without any support from anybody, even if you're brilliant.
> that working for them sucked, and as a result the Weird Nerd's career has tanked because no one new will work with them.
We don't know for a fact that that's what killed their career. That's just the op's impression having worked with the person. The real truth is often muddy. And of course we've all met people who are extremely insufferable to their subordinates and peers but manage upwards very well and go on to very fruitful careers.
I love weird nerds, I love the sort of people who obsess about things, who work on them as obsessively as I do, I love info dumps, I love people who are passionate even about bizarre, niche shit I don't care about (actually, I love them even more for it!) but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you.
And I fully accept that autism runs through this pack of people like a freight train, and that's fair, I am always down to provide accommodations, I will talk to people how they need to be talked to, I will bend the norms of social interaction so it's more palatable, all of that, zero issues whatsoever. But even with that in consideration, relationships of all kinds are a give and take, and if all you do is take, people will notice, and people will avoid you.
You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits lol no they don't it's just that they exhibit more of group-thinking and less individualism, so they provoke less situations that might potentially cause conflict.
My experience with nerds is "ok each has their own opinion this is going to be difficult but let's try cooperating" whereas non-nerds act exclusively "my way or the highway" because they have never previously encountered the idea that their view of the world might be wrong "because I'm the majority".
The thesis of the initial discussion is that it is unfair to hold "weird nerds" to certain standards.
The person you are responding to is claiming that actually some of these standards are important.
Your response to that of claiming that the standards are important is to say that actually normal people don't pass those standards either.
This doesn't refute the argument that the standards are important, but would actually agree with them that actually yes it is totally fine to hold people to important standards, weird nerd or not. (And in fact, you think the weird nerds are even better are following the standards! So what is the issue of holding them to those standards then?)
Imagine you have an all-Arab company and you hire a Jew. Of course there's going to be a lot of drama, even it that particular employee has fantastic social skills, and would thrive in an environment full of people from their own culture.
My point is, in order to achieve the same result "collaborate with others and not cause drama" nerds need much higher social skills than non-nerds, simply because they're a minority.
It might reasonable to hold people to important standards, while these standards might be inherently unfair. It depends on whether you value effects or effort.
And that's before we get into nerds being a minority which is just... no. Nerd shit is so mainstream at this point and co-opting minority status to talk about you really being into geology or something is... a lot.
There's a lot going on here and I'm not interested in unpacking it, have a lovely day.
Your reply can be summarized as "workplace is magically immune to natural friction that occurs when people from vastly different social groups interact because I strongly believe in HR's wishful thinking and besides, talking about two social groups that are commonly known to hate each other to the point that they don't want to recognize each other's statehood is just non-compliant and goes against our community standards"
edit: to be fair, it is extremely necessary to have both voices at the table challenging one another
I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd).
Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd. And none of them appeared to be geniuses. Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common attribute, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.)
Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.
And in what way is Katalin Karikó responsible for your mistreatment? I doubt you would have said something similar about a black or gay former manager, attributing your mistreatment to their race or sexual orientation. But for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to attribute it to a Weird Nerd personality.