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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Covering for people on holidays? What an JERK!

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?

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.

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"You know that guy who's been here from the beginning, he's mentored most of us and covered 75% of the sick days and holidays and outages since we started?"

"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've worked with some "brilliant jerks" before. But they were never the type to cover on holidays, bring in the most revenue, etc. The brilliant jerks I knew tended to be selfish and negative. Perhaps he didn't share the company vision, but this guy didn't sound like a jerk (well, until he started suing the company after he left).

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.

Mortgage-driven development is distinct from "brilliant jerk."

http://codemanship.co.uk/parlezuml/blog/?postid=147

I hadn't heard that term before - thanks!

I was hoping / expecting the article to conclude with a recommendation on how to best channel the energy / talent of the "brilliant jerk". Not have this person fired. Promote him, but limit him, under a specifically defined position in the company where the boundaries are set - e.g. Head of Product Development, Head of Business Ops, Line Management, Finance...

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...

I was also hoping for something along the lines of "how to get better productivity from difficult people"

The brilliant jerk will sabotage a growing company.

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.

The question is whether that scales past a certain point.

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.

I'm curious, how much management experience do you have? More specifically, for how many years have you managed a company with 5 or more employees?

Do you have a point that you intend to write a supporting argument for, or are you just casting aspersions?

as-per-sion:
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? ;-)

There is a reason you are being down voted. When read against the parent comment your comments as some sort of an assumption about the guy and that if the company has more than 5 employees the star contributors must fired, a highly mediocre rule-by-bureaucracy large corporate manager must be bought in at the point.

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