Why firing brilliant assholes is required to build a great engineering culture

"Engineers care less about equity, salary and benefits and more about the problems they’re going to be working on."

TIL I am not worthy of the title "Engineer"

I can work on interesting problems on my own time. Salary from some Schmoe's payroll account enables me to do that.

"Startups are supposed to be technology-driven"

That's untrue. Most startups are focusing on something not purely technological, in which case the business drives the roadmap. The real problem is the supposition that a business needs brilliant engineers.

"Some founders think that you hire a bunch of great engineers, put them in a room and awesome stuff is just going to come out." This is so true in every setting, but especially a start-up where you have to work closely with everyone. One brat can really spoil the environment!

You shouldn't stop at assholes. People who make it hard to work together or people who communicate poorly, are so incredibly frustrating. It doesn't matter how technically capable they are, it's going to hurt the team effort.

This reminds me of the post Rand from SEOmoz wrote on his personal blog a while ago. Great read.