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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

However, in my experience the vast majority of brilliant nerds way overextend themselves, and are much too confident outside their domain. They're also much more likely to be jerks and will tumble from conflict to conflict until they get their way by attrition or status. Conflicts are strangely more personal because so much ego is tied up into it. They're more likely to assume they're right in every (non-tech/science related) situation.

Your next paragraph gives advice to the weird nerds, but this is practically a genre. What I haven’t seen much of is advice to an organization about how to deal with what you’re pointing out here.

You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?

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This won't be a satisfying answer (and won't work for startups), but the solution I saw most frequently was to assign them dedicated diplomats or maintain a middle mgmt class who are well suited to coddle them, absorb most of their emotional energy, and channel it productively (or not) into the wider institution.

That’s been my experience as well. But these minders are not cheap. They need to be smart enough to win the respect of their assigned WNs, charismatic enough to smooth everyone else’s ruffled feathers, patient, and have thick skins.

Definitely worth it for a Nobel Prize level intellect but I’m not sure how far below that the line is.

The teenagers working at the local McDonalds do a fine job modifying some truly unpleasant people.

They have the added benefit of not having to give a damn about those people, as they interact infrequently, and likely won't even recognize each other the next time. An occasional unpleasant regular is a different story entirely, but I suppose that's what the security person is there for.

This hurts to read. At my previous employer I more or less carried the technical part of the organization, but also had strong opinions about high level strategy and equity (in terms of pay distribution across staff). In my defense, it was an NGO where I was working well below market rates and the opinions I pushed came from caring a lot about the mission, but it definitely led to a lot of conflict.

I think it's an interesting question, how organizations should deal with this. I think my previous employer actually dealt with it quite well - for the issues I cared about I _was_ given the opportunity to express my opinions and also share them with the people who were in the positions for making decisions around these issues. I was generally listened to patiently and also got (sometimes unsatisfying) explanations for why the actual course of action was different. I was _not_ given the authority to make these decisions or push these issues (the ones outside my area of expertise) through. I ended up leaving the organization in quite a bit of frustration, which I think was probably unavoidable, but I learned a ton from this episode, and we're otherwise still on good terms (I help out with little things now and then).

"You're out of your depth."

That's what you do.

A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that. Intelligence allows someone to gain that insight faster than those in the middle of the bell curve of IQ, but it doesn't magically confer it. It still takes time, reading, research, and seeing it in practice.

Or put another way - what I call the "Iceberg Analogy" - every discipline in life is like an iceberg. The average person sees about 10% of what's actually happening, and is able to comprehend that without too much effort, but the other 90% that's below the surface takes a lot to fully make sense of.

> A lot of very smart people think because they're very smart they have some kind of exceptional insight into the inner workings of all things. They don't. And they need to be reminded of that.

When you talk to people, you have no idea how much time they've spent before that conversation gaining insight. Maybe their simple phrase is a culmination of several years of research and insight, whereas for you, you just thought about this topic yesterday.

Seems like normies need to be reminded of that way more frequently than nerds.

A better response would be to tell them you are done trying to convince them because you own the responsibility and consequences of the decision. "You're out of your depth" is an insult and is intended to be one.

Is saying that someone has no expertise in a subject necessarily an insult?

To me, your proposal sounds more like a band-aid, instead of treating the core ailment: someone who won't recognize their own fallibility.

Perhaps it can't be "treated", and we just have to make do with such "band aids". But wouldn't it be more productive if we could just get to the root of it?

"You're out of your depth" is an insult to someone with an excessive ego.

If you're not actually out of your depth, you won't be insulted by it.

I don't get insulted when someone says I'm stupid. Because that is not true, and I know it isn't true. It isn't the things we know to be untrue that insults us - it's the things that we know to be true, that we can't accept - or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us.

> or even worse - can't see about ourselves that insult us

Isn't this the point of the previous comment? That the WN thinks they're not out of their depth and can't see that about themselves. So it is an insult from that perspective.

> "You're out of your depth."

Except most of the time ... they are not. Most non-junior WNs learn to have significant respect for those doing the work. The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions.

Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled. And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else.

The WN can see that you are rewarding the politician rather than the person who actually did the work. The WN will actually calculate the full cap table and see the distortion that flags the insider backscratching. The WN can envision exactly how the sales incentives will be exploited. etc.

Effectively, the WN is a canary that detects bad managers immediately unlike normal people. And that's something that bad managers simply cannot abide.

I have been in a meeting where the weird nerd is saying "our company should completely ditch customer support phone lines and only use a chat service because I don't know anyone who wants to make a phone call". This company was a utility that had customers with every level of literacy and internet access. He was mindbogglingly wrong, because he had no idea there was information in the world that he hadn't come across. It's very common - so common it's called engineer syndrome.

And, ironically, I had the exact opposite conversation where we kept paying money to fund customer support phone lines that had one call in 6 months because the sales and marketing team couldn't conceive of the fact that nobody under 30 (our primary demographic) wanted to use voice anymore and were screaming for an app/webapp chat of some form.

Not knowing your customers isn't unique to engineers.

Ironically, that's what the companies have been doing for the past few years, by having people talk to voice assistant "AI"s instead of humans.

Hell, you could argue the process started much earlier: before voice assistants came DTMF phone menus with automated recordings; before that came outsourcing customer support to cheapest labor available - which is like hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line, except with protein robots paid peanuts and worked to the bone instead.

> He was mindbogglingly wrong

How do you know?

Studies already suggest that 9 out of 10 people prefer text communication with businesses. Of the remaining 10%, we have to establish that they:

1. Prefer the phone over other alternatives. Some may want face-to-face communication, for example.

2. Want to phone a utility in the first place. Preferring phone communication over other means does not imply that they want to communicate.

3. That the person of which you speak knows of them. Someone who really does want to phone a utility, but is not known by said person, would not meet the qualifications defined.

Unless you actually compiled a list of those he knows and surveyed them in a good faith standing, you can't know. The statistics are not in your favour, though. It is quite unlikely that he does know someone who wants to make a phone call to said utility. Perhaps your weird nerdiness has clouded seeing that?

No, we don’t have to establish that he knows them. It doesn’t matter if he is right about the people he knows: he is wrong about the customer base and the business decision.

> And that pisses of corporatocrats like you worse than anything else.

Congratulations, you've shown you don't know how the world actually works. This is called "Weird Nerd" but it really means, "Someone who can't operate within society and thus is forced to suffer because they'll do the hard work of building or designing something, but won't do the hard work of understanding human beings."

First, go learn how the world actually works. Not the way you clearly - and incorrectly - believe it to work - the way it actually works. Then once you figure out how to operate within the system, you might actually get something worthwhile done.

> The Weird Nerd judges based upon objectively observed behavior rather than social cues or group opinions.

This is why they so consistently fail.

> Mostly, the Weird Nerd gets in trouble because they simply aren't fooled.

They get in trouble because they have an incorrect mental model of the world and are instead stuck in how they think the world "ought" to work, instead of how it "actually" works.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw

The pragmatist in me is sympathetic to your viewpoint here. But the article in question is making the point that when Weird Nerds have to "figure out how to operate within the system", they actually lose their ability to get something worthwhile done. That still might be the optimal path for them to take as individuals, given the incentives they face, but maybe as a society, we'd be better off trying to design the system so that it could better tolerate the "downsides" of the Weird Nerd so they can maximize their ability to get something worthwhile done.

Obviously this is a balancing act (as the article points out), but the author is making the point that some environments (like academia) have swung too far in the direction of conformity, which seems to me to usually be presented using the exact language you're using here.

> You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?

The same thing you do with any highly anti-social employee, fire them. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated their technical skills are, if they are incapable of transforming that into value for the company, then their value to the organisation is at best nothing, and more likely negative.

Companies/institutions are social systems, and the phrase “politics” is mostly just used to refer to “social skills”. If too many of the participants are corrupt or incompetent then the social network of the organisation can become especially toxic. But that’s a different problem to the fact that if you want to contribute value in such a system, you need to have social skills.

Can you get value out of somebody who has terrible social skills? Maybe sometimes, but it takes a lot of babysitting. Even then, you’ll never be able to properly trust that you’ll be able to rely on them to do anything ever. So it’s almost never worth the cost.

Congrats, the university you run just lost out on a Nobel Prize. The donors are going to love that.

I’m sure this is the threat that the brilliant asshole types would want you to believe. But there’s no limit to the amount of talent that one single toxically anti-social team member can deter from joining an institution, or that they can chase out of one for that matter. Especially if they’re a senior team member.

There’s also essentially no limit to the amount of damage they can do in companies. Even if you put aside the potential impact on company culture, I’ve seen many engineers needlessly waste huge amounts of company resources pursuing solutions that they considered to be technically brilliant (and which may have been), but were completely misaligned with the company’s objectives. I’ve personally witnessed one (especially brilliant) Rust engineer drive a company completely out of business with this approach.

In general I agree with all that. And genius is a wildly overused term. But that doesn’t mean there’s none. TFA is talking about a woman that won a Nobel Prize.

Not every organization is going to have any opportunity to snag one but if you are running MIT, Google, or Lawrence Livermore you probably need to consider how to handle that edge case.

You’re profoundly correct, and I’m amazed by the amount of ignorance on display in this thread and in this article. The conflation of “weird nerd” with “person who thinks they are above what the perceive as politics”, or “smart asshole” or “antisocial genius” is really at odds with the usual case. Real “weird nerds” might have innocuous flaws like a tendency for extreme grandiloquence or terrible body language, but frequently the Weirdest Nerds I have interacted with are kind over and above any other quality. It’s not “weird” to hate workplace politics or think that you’re the smartest guy in the room - both of those are extremely common. Many organizations operate on these basic components, it’s kind of a sad default for business. The weirdest nerd of all is the one who can calmly explain something complex to a new hire or do the hard work of documenting and explaining their position rather than trying to belittle others. I’ve seen toxic employees do far more damage than I have seen geniuses who single-handedly save the day. The latter are largely a hallucination brought on by repeated exposure to myths like the 10x engineer.

>You have an employee that’s brilliant in technical area X but also has very strong and very wrong opinions about how the company ought to structure its cap table, pay its cleaning staff, and market to potential customers. He gets into constant arguments about these things. What do you do?

Call him to your office and warn him his behaviour is unacceptable as it is interrupting the business. If he still persists, fire him for insubordination and/or disrupting the workplace.

The difference between a master and a nerd is whether the talent is socially desired, and the difference between being employed and unemployed is whether you can be productive to society regardless of your personal leanings.

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