What do you do with the Brilliant Jerk?
boss.blogs.nytimes.com
boss.blogs.nytimes.com
Bringing in the most revenue and publishing the most? PSH! What a totally useless bit of dead weight!
Oh, and the other people in the group respect this guy? What are they idiots? Don't they know they should be respecting me?
/s
edit: ya know, reading this and some other things about how "smart people" are so bad at communicating, except to other "smart people" makes we wonder what the managers are actually doing.
Clearly the can't actually manage the talent, they can't even figure out how to talk to them. You see that's you're job, managers, managing the talent. If you can't handle that thing that is right there in your title, then what the hell are you doing here? You're not fit for the job.
To me the answer seems obvious: flatten out your org, put "smart people" at the top, and ditch the guy whose response to acquiring talent is to fire them. He's the weak link.
"Yea, what about him?"
"I fired him cuz I didn't like his attitude anymore. We're a growing company and we can't have jerks like that on the team."
"What took you so long?"
That is NOT the kind of company I want to work for.
I will say that the true jerks have a way of worming their way into the company. For example they'll do a lot of work with the goal of making sure they're the only one who understands some certain process. Then they horde knowledge and never want anyone else in there or any documentation to exist. The team is afraid to fire them because nobody knows or has the time to learn that part of the system.
I'm a Stargate fan and when I read brilliant jerk, I thought Rodney McKay and Nicholas Rush. Yeah, they had there issues, but at the end of the day, you can count on them...
1. a damaging or derogatory remark or criticism; slander: casting aspersions on a campaign rival.
2. the act of slandering; vilification; defamation; calumniation; derogation: Such vehement aspersions cannot be ignored.
And you? ;-)
I've worked with a few "Brilliant Jerks"; it's probably not the best name, but there are people who mean the best and will probably be stars in one environment but will demoralize larger teams. I thought that was what the author was trying to discuss.
When the company is no longer relying on their expertise the jerk needs to supplement the adrenaline rush of being important, so they create drama around the new people you have brought on board, justified or not.
That is the case for firing them. It is something of a 'coming of age' for a startup when amazing employees can't handle the growth outside of the garage.
If the jerk is not sabotaging the growth then by all means, give them new challenges that are crucial to the company.. but perhaps you don't actually have a brilliant jerk problem. You have a brilliant employee who can learn to change and grow with the company. That is not what the article is describing.
Not only does this strike me as a mismanagement of talent, but it is almost bordering on the unethical. While I do not claim to know the specifics involved, some of the anecdotes gave me pause :
>> And the Brilliant Jerk speaks the truth. But I have also seen him stick his head in the door and deflate an entire management team. A growth company needs enablers, not disablers.
A growth company also needs sensible advice, and sensible advice should not be confused with being a "disabler". Too often I have seen rational advice get dismissed because reality isn't compatible with someone's bold new plan.
Not knowing the specifics here, it's not too hard to imagine a scenario in which a "management" team gets carried away with lofty and unrealistic goals only to be "deflated" by someone with actual technical insight.
Talk to the person for pete's sake. If they're underperforming or their net contribution to the company (via culture or performance) is negative, then work with them to improve or work with them to change jobs. Maybe they need a different position. Maybe they need to leave and start their own company.
But if you label them, put them down, and attempt to deal with them "as a problem" rather than as a human being, then yes, you will have problems.
This is just an example of inept management of talent, nothing more. I encourage everyone to disregard this article except as a case study in how not to manage people, and try to do better.
The point is, you have to evaluate these situations on their merits. If someone really is dividing the company and producing a negative effect, then obviously you need to deal with that in some way. But if they're not destroying the culture (indeed most are adding to it in some way if they care about the company and work hard), then it's not a cut-and-dry decision.
However, the No Asshole Rule makes some very good points along these lines, so perhaps there is merit to the idea of avoiding jerks at any costs from the beginning.
This kind of management strives to guide the now-profitable and low-risk venture towards a state of permanent mediocrity; the remaining smart, stellar people merely stand in the way.
The new management's desire is to secure their position in the organization by instituting policies that require that information and knowledge flow through them, amassing a greater base of direct and indirect reports, and redefining their internal metrics of "success" in a way that's genuinely divorced from external reality.
The Brilliant Jerk in this situation should be promoted, the new management should never have been hired.
We recently made our B-series round. The CEO and CFO have been in closed door meetings for months, leaving us adrift. The VC firm has installed people on the board and in the office, so they need attention. The people around here that put in the late nights and hair-tearing conference calls are pretty much being ignored. Communication has fallen off a cliff. But hey, we're a Real Company now!
Good thing I'm turning in my notice next week.
I've mentioned it previously here (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4503224) but this is a classic example of management ineptitude and ego passing up opportunities because it's "hard" to be challenged by someone more intelligent than yourself.
So if you're someone who wants to plan your own house (and especially if you're someone who feels like you need "authority" to do it) you have a built-in incentive to ban power tools from the workplace.
Excellent engineers should only be managed by excellent managers. Excellent managers should only hire 5X+ developers, there's no reason to hire anyone worse than that. If you absolutely must, keep the grunt team heavily partitioned away from the real team and DON'T let them dictate strategy or culture.
I think the root of this problem is that most of the people who have access to capital really aren't 10X at anything so you have an extreme mismatch of skill vs. authority in most companies.
This seems to be exactly what happened to the OP. The superstar spent years after poaching employees and starting trouble.
"I am too stupid to manage employees smarter than me so I label them and get rid of them. I am always correct and everyone else is wrong and this has nothing to do with me being the boss."
Also that line about Gates and Jobs is just there so the author can try and draw a parallel to them and thus inflate their position and validate their actions.
The key takeaway for me from this article is that startup employee culture is as important as technical ability. It's a scaling challenge; if you need to go from 3 people to 20+ and one of those earliest people is poisoning the culture you have a real problem. Hopefully good management can address that problem without going so far as firing someone. But sometimes the solution is to get rid of a jerk, no matter how brilliant they are.
The article could be right if it spoke about genuine "brilliant jerks". Companies I've worked have passed on candidates who aced the technical interview but then proceeded to yell at at interviewers when there was a disagreement or make sexist remarks (duh on the latter point).
I am not saying it doesn't happen, I've yet to encounter any existing employees who were truly brilliant jerks: I've encountered brilliant engineers who had trouble related and showed impatience with average (that is average compared to other engineers within the company) engineers, but none were worth firing. They also had a particular eye for under-appreciated talent and would often spot and mentor employees with high potential, but who had underperformed (compared to their potential that is -- they may have still done well in a stack ranking, but they had the potential to contribute a lot more) whether due to lack of focus, lack of self discipline, or plain inexperience (almost always a lack of debugging skills).
I have also encountered employees who were jerks, were technically good (but never true outliers) but were political and were more interested in growing their power rather than technical excellence. They would be worth firing, but the problem is jerks follow a "kiss up, kick down" pattern: traditional ("micro-") managers love them and give them free reign to bully other employees (including the technically brilliant but less socially and politically apt individual contributors).
No solution is going to be perfect -- and I am not nearly experienced enough to speak from anything but gut feel -- but what seems to work (and have created engineerings organizations where I enjoy/have enjoyed working) is:
1) Filter out jerks, ladder climbers (those more motivated by status and money than by impact, learning, or solving hard problems) as a part of the hiring process (which includes -- but is not limited to -- the interview process).
2) Take extra-ordinary steps to reduce company politics. This is easier said than done: good[1] startups avoid that because everyone is aligned to the same goal, the trick is maintaining that kind of an alignment as the companies grows. I am currently reaping the fruits of such an atmosphere, but I am still learning and trying to understand how this is accomplished.
[1] There are just as many terrible startups as there are amazing ones -- and there is less of a thing such as "an average startup". Quality (in terms of "place to work") follows an inverted Bell Curve. I have heard (but fortunately haven't experienced firsthand) my share of horror stories of small startups that are far more political at 20 people than Google was at 20,000 people. Naturally, the earlier the stage, the greater the variance.
I've dealt with what I thought were brilliant jerks before, and they always made people feel small and inadequate, and generally had an attitude of annoyance with "lesser mortals", if you will. This didn't change whether the company was 3 people or 100 people.
Is my analysis of that author's type of "Brilliant Jerk" correct? And if so, what are the problems that the "Brilliant Jerk" causes as the team grows.
It might be true but there was a period when SJ himself was a brilliant jerk. I don't think firing him did any good to apple.
By a roundabout way, it did! If Jobs had not been fired from apple he would not have learned a whole slew of valuable lessons which he applied upon his return.
Even the author says "When we hired him, we hired over our heads."
I fail to see how this is a cautionary tale of hiring and firing "brilliant jerks." It reeks much more of incompetent management.
A web search for "STI Knowledge" http://www.the-resource-center.com/catalogs/sti_knowledge_ce... suggests they do training seminars for help desk staff.
Sounds to me like this guy doesn't have a clue about the kind of talent management applicable to high-tech startups.
Before firing a brilliant team member with what the author perceives as an incorrigibly caustic attitude, he'd better be very sure there are not genuine issues in the organization that really ought to be resolved first.
The world needs brilliant jerks. They get things done, partially because they're brilliant but also sometimes because they're jerks.
1. Saying why you shouldn't do something is not complaining. If done correctly, it helps you avoid really big errors.
2. Unity is often overrated. If a company is "united" in making poor business decisions that are bad for the long-term health of the company and this "brilliant" guy is being a "jerk" for suggesting they do something else. I find "unity" as a goal sounds really nice, but when that replaces actual discussion, you end up with a very dangerous organization susceptible to self-deception and self-harm that go full speed ahead because they're "united".
I really don't like this advice at all. I think it might work for the smart guy who underperforms, but for the example the author quoted, I think this is terrible, terrible advice.
I did my job, but I sure as hell poured all my weekend and personal time into the exercise stuff and bug fixing. Really pissed off the CTO who took it personally that I was not working on his weight loss stuff in my personal time as well as my on the clock time. I think, to run a good company, you have to combine everyone's desires. Letting me work on my things in my time would have been the way to do that. Instead the managers just go ape shit over someone who doesn't fit into the homogenous culture they want.
Maybe the Jerk doctor in this article is fed up with stepping in and working extra to keep the business working and the reciprocity has dried up.
At the same time, I've seen people convince others that they're doing the business a favor by hoarding all the work, working long hours, taking credit for others' work, and building up systems that require their knowledge to operate. This is all well and good in a startup where you have few people, but it's murder any time you go beyond that.
There are certainly corner cases. For example a company developing a particular technology might need some savant for a while to build the proof-of-concept product. However once that's done this employee's abrasive nature can have a negative impact on other employees and company culture. In this rare case I'd choose compassion for the employee. This could involve working with them, giving them projects they enjoy that don't involve working with others or even recommending them to another company with a note about their talent and people skills trade-off.
There's also the case where an employee is regarded as brilliant but lacking people skills and is just plain dysfunctional. The technical skills are lacking but people are afraid to confront the person because they will yell or become angry. In this case the person should be fired ASAP.
The writer didn't say what his input or benefit was to this outfit. I know who I would have fired.
Firing to keep things running smoothly is easy. Managing people to move forward is tough.
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-em...
The solution - if it's worth it, personally mitigate their bad behavior. If you can't make them a net positive, drop them.
I say "almost" above because the manager should have fired his ass. He didn't because he was a personal friend that he personally brought into the company, which was another failing.
* Stage of growth is important. In the beginning, success is more about individual effort. When you get bigger, it's more about overall team culture.
* It's not just "being a jerk" that's the problem. It's being a naysayer, working against the culture.
At a certain size, the negative effects of someone's behavior on the culture can outweigh the positives of their brilliance. And when that happens, you have to let them go.
The critical bit though is toxicity. There are people like Jeff Dean at Google who are 10x more productive than anyone else but make everyone work harder, and there are people who are 10x more productive but they make everyone around them feel like crap. That makes them toxic.
So if your brilliant engineer spends their time telling younger or less brilliant engineers how they just threw out all their crappy (but functional) code and re-wrote so that they could tolerate reading it, it doesn't bring others along. If they 'sign up' for all of the work so it will "be done right" and then slow the whole project down because nobody can work on it, they aren't "adding value."
I think the author was going for people who had become toxic, not people who were still moving everyone forward.
The problem might be hiring the younger or less brilliant engineers, and also placing them in positions where they cause significant damage, as it's driving your brilliant engineers to be toxic.
What a horrible advice. This guy is basically asking you to make your employees sacrifice their whole lives to make your company successful. And then when you and your company actually make it big, mercilessly kick them out without their due deserved rewards.
This sort of thing creates the 'Zynga stories', where senior executives don't want the chef to get rich. Or that the hardworking programmer in his cubicle no matter how hardworking he is doesn't deserve to get rich. And no matter how lazy the senior executive is, by the virtue of his designation, big college degree status is automatically inclined to a better compensation.
This might work for a one of case. But on a longer is a disaster for the start up ecosystem. If these stories spread, no good guy will ever want to work for a start up.
Honestly, if I were to manage the kind of self-driven, startup oriented, charismatic doctor that the article talks about, I would feel like I was wasting their talent every time they came to work. This kind of talent doesn't belong in a proverbially esclerotic Enterprise, it belongs in a medical startup or something. Kick them out and send them to an employer that really needs someone like them. You're not that startup, you're BigCorp now. Put on your grey suit.
But there is something to the effect of a "bad apple" on the barrel as a whole: http://www.inc.com/matthew-swyers/toss-the-bad-apple-employe...
From my own experience, the best way to diffuse me when I'm turning into the "brilliant jerk" is to give me some projects with some breathing room. I'm a lot less jerky when I having being through a serial stream of "jumping on the grenade" on critical/stressful projects that were about to explode.
Brilliant jerk is great for a startup but get rid of him if you are no longer a startup and growing rapidly ?
Any examples of that?
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest."--Thomas Paine
When a company grows beyond this limit, it has to be managed by process and hierarchy. The human brain simply cannot apply tribal management to a few thousand employees, contractors, suppliers, customers, business partners, etc.
If you tell your friends "You guys are crazy, that will never work", they interpret it through an emotional lens that will probably make them enthusiastic about trying harder with a different approach. If you do the same thing to a task group you barely know, their enthusiasm will evaporate and at least a few will start working on their resumes. This is the Brilliant Jerk problem.
Some of these Brilliant Jerks can probably be retrained to work in the new, larger company. The thesis of the article is that some of them cannot, and it is best to jettison them sooner rather than later.