Are Quirky Developers Brilliant or Dangerous?

My experience is that developers who think they are gods gift to programming have too little self-doubt / introspection to:

1. produce code usable for others 2. solve problems in a simple and sustainable way - since they are so great, anything they do must be good... solutions tend to be cryptic

"The same developer who wasn’t quite the team player is now the one who management elevates to the head of the pack."

actually what I see the most in EVERY company I ever worked on is quite the contrary: the incompetent are the first to be promoted to heads of the pack...

There is no absolute standard for "readable" code. I have served in positions where recursion, lambda expressions and short circuit evaluation were considered clever hacks requiring documentation and got me branded as a troublemaker.

Ideally, readability standards would be made an explicit part of team/project policy but it's difficult to define that standard without taking things for granted.

Being a smelly jerk is certainly also a problem, but an orthagonal one.

Stereotypes are more dangerous than quirky developers. Though they are often found together, don't conflate aptitude with eccentricity or grooming.

Duh? They're both.