When Smart People Make Bad Employees 491
theodp writes "Writing for Forbes, CS-grad-turned-big-time-VC Ben Horowitz gives three examples of how the smartest people in a company can also be the worst employees: 1. The Heretic, who convincingly builds a case that the company is hopeless and run by a bunch of morons; 2. The Flake, who is brilliant but totally unreliable; 3. The Jerk, who is so belligerent in his communication style that people just stop talking when he is in the room. So, can an employee who fits one of these poisonous descriptions, but nonetheless can make a massive positive contribution to a company, ever be tolerated? Quoting John Madden's take on Terrell Owens, Horowitz gives a cautious yes: 'If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you'll be so late that you'll miss the game, so you can't do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you'll have a player that's so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him.' Ever work with a person who's so good that he/she gets his/her own set of rules? Ever been that person yourself?"
Re:Like astrology .. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they don't want smart pepole then stop 4-6 year (Score:4, Insightful)
If they don't want smart people then stop forcing people to have 4-6+ year degrees to get jobs and have more on the job training.
I was unfireable once. So I quit. (Score:4, Insightful)
That job was sucking the life out of me.
It's not that I'm particularly good at what I do.
It's that the place was dis-functional.
The only things that got done were through back channels.
With the inevitable outcome.
Spaghetti code sucks, spaghetti management is worse.
Manage them (Score:5, Insightful)
And boy are there some odd people among them!
But the majority just did what was expected, come up with novel ideas and ways to do things different and better.
It takes a special type of management/manager to point these brains in the right direction and when this happens it's great to see.
When the management isn't able to control these wizkids you will eventually have a problem but as they were between peers they usually were made to get back to producing what they were hired for.
The best you can do is to give them a real challenge and reward them with a bigger challenge.
More anti-intellegence shlock (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what's worse than a smart person who is lazy and doesn't show up on time? A dumb person that is lazy and doesn't show up on time. All of those traits he listed aren't qualities that solely belong to "smart people."
Re:I Tend To Be That Person (Score:4, Insightful)
You'd be amazed how many people are oblivious to design.
But in this case, I think AC is not really talking about design, but a mental cantrip where you use the far better modelling system of your brain rather than a wall covered in sticky notes that some people prefer, in order to some up with a truly holistic design.
I do the same, and find it baffling when other cannot do it.
Re:Bad according to whom (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brilliant Jerks (Score:4, Insightful)
If your solution really is superior, but implementing it and maintaining it is beyond the abilities of your team, then it is not workable. As the smarter person, it is your responsibility to figure out what that limit is, and stay under it.
If you can't do this, then you aren't quite as gifted as you think you are.
Re:Depends on the task (Score:5, Insightful)
I have found that smart people are really bad at simple, repetitive, boring tasks.
They get bored, start daydreaming, and make mistakes.
I find that they automate away the problem, and then spend their time doing whatever they want while pretending to work.
a lot of articles like this one these days (Score:5, Insightful)
I seem to remember a time when tech culture was better tolerated, if misunderstood. Post dot-com era, the old conformist culture has reasserted itself with it's fucked up, ultimately self-defeating expectations, where feelings matter more than fact, process matters more than results, and blind loyalty matters more than earned respect. This is the primary reason technical people run into trouble at work.
Sure, there are assholes in every field, but the best technical people are rarely if ever socially well-adapted. Their minds are world-focused, not people-focused. This is what allows them to do their jobs well in the first place. Their caustic (to non techs) attitudes manifest because they are often focal points within their organizations that end up interfacing expectation (often hollywood trained) with technical realities. PHBs don't give a shit about the details, they "hired you to make it work, so make it work" even while they refuse to grant you required resources/time/training because they lack proper understanding in the first place (and often lack the desire to learn the basics so they can manage properly). Being less people-oriented already, that pressure often blows off in lots of dark, satirical sarcasm, one-liners, and other nuggets of wisdom that, more often than not, hit too close to home for insecure management and coworkers. Instead of encouraging hyper-sensitivity, culture in general needs to toughen up if it wants to be effective in solving problems. In short, many techs would have better attitudes if they were listened to a bit more (no I do not mean despotic deference). They will never be warm, people-pleasers, but, trust me, you don't want them that way.
I suggest all the would-be well-this-is-how-real-'professionals'-like-me-work posters stop and think about how stressful their situations are and/or how good they really are before they preach to those they'd dismiss as anti-social malcontents who need to get with it. Neuro-typicals make mediocre techs at best, that's why they hire us in the first place.
Re:Brilliant Jerks (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, today's brilliant jerk is tomorrow's has-been grognard. Five years ago they were hot shit in C and they let everyone know. Today we're a C# shop and they're useless because they were too good to keep up.
Re: confession (Score:5, Insightful)
And thereby do we traverse the tortuous path from intelligence to wisdom...
The Quick-Fixer (Score:5, Insightful)
He's actually very smart, but he's always taking the quickest, dirtiest route to the goal. If a hack will do it, he'll do it and make that part of any critical process without a second thought to architecture, interdependencies or anything like that. If a manual workaround is faster, that's what he'll do - or mostly instruct others to do. For that he's known as a problem solver and is in high regard with management, which means nobody gets to rein him in.
What they don't see is that every system runs like crap and is impossible to understand because there's weird kludges upon kludges upon kludges. Many interdependencies are completely irrational, you're afraid to touch anything to break it. That all the manual workarounds are choking the efficiency of everyone else, which are of course blamed when the endless manual steps and "remember this, check that, copy this field to that then save, alter status, execute this job" gets too complicated, error prone and slow. And he's mostly oblivious to this himself, he praises how the quickfixes help us even when quickfixes are the reason it's such a huge and complicated process to begin with. What's saving him is that nobody can do better, because everything is such a clusterfuck they don't understand anything and so full of special cases and other mine fields that the answers are bound to be wrong.
Re:Bad according to whom (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're that smart, then you find a way to approach the problem constructively. At risk of sounding like a PHB myself, learn to "manage upwards".
I've worked for a (newly promoted) manager who was *absolutely clueless* about what my team did for him, and what our role was supposed to do. He was absolutely incompetent to manage us, and provided no "leadership" that was recognizable as such to my group. He was a business analyst trying to get experience in the technical side of the division for a run at a higher management position.
So, we educated him. And not by undermining him, making him look foolish, and getting him replaced: by presenting our case at every opportunity, by highlighting the risks and benefits of various projects we wanted to work on, by basically pushing him and making it look like he was leading us. He grew as a manager as a result, and we ended up being the guys with a good reputation for working well with customers & other teams, and coming up with excellent solutions, and all of us got promotions for our efforts, because this manager realized that we were helping him and making his department look good.
We could have gone the other way, and bitched about him non-stop, and been the heretics. But it would have simply burned career bridges for us, and turned the clueless boss into a jerk, and we would've ended up drawing the same pay we started with. If your entire management chain is absolutely, profoundly clueless, then your workplace is doomed, and you should seek employment elsewhere. If it's one or two clueless managers, learn how to deal with them and you'll make a couple friends for life.
Re:Maybe we are right? (Score:4, Insightful)
So you have a brilliant employee who is unhappy because he sees how things go wrong and is disempowered. If you really want to keep him, then maybe it would be better to cut down on micromanagement and enable employees to make decisions. Or you have someone whose abilities you are not using fully - well that could be seen as an opportunity rather than a problem.
He's right, that once the employee has shared his unhappiness with 50 friends he's not likely to change his mind anymore. You shouldn't let that happen in the first place - listen to complaints and fix problems. Having the mindset that any employee issue can only be dealt with as a personnel matter - that's a good way to create problem employees.
Re:Like astrology .. (Score:2, Insightful)
Good point. Some of the best teams I've ever had were made up of very ... "eccentric" individuals. As long as the person in charge can figure out how to keep them happy and working in tandem, you'll get great results. The problems usually occur when outsiders start butting in, or when part of the job is dealing with more "normal" people.
Re:Brilliant Jerks (Score:4, Insightful)
The above assumes that you have (a) a high amount of funds to spend on compensation, (b) access to better trained people, and (c) opportunities sufficient to attract such talent.
There are only a handful of entities in the entire world that can satisfy all three criteria. The Yankees, Manchester United, and Google come to mind.
There is no reason to be a jerk (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no reason to be a jerk, ever. But a lot of really smart people get put into positions that are downright miserable simply because they are the smartest person in the room, get frustrated, and then turn into jerks.
A lot of smart people don't understand how the world works, how much humans are dictated by a herd mentality and it comes back to bite them in the ass. For example, an extremely bright recent graduate gets a job at a company staffed mainly engineers who are 5 to 10 years older than them. The young, smart fellow may think "if I work hard and showcase my talents I will soon get ahead". Sadly, the world does not work that way. People who have been working for 5 - 10 years in a job don't like to see people younger than them master it in 1 or 2. What they hate even more is having to work for a somebody younger than themselves. If you think we live in a meritocracy you've never worked in an organization with more than 2 levels of management.
I've seen many young, brilliant engineers apply themselves, get chewed up by the political machine, and become abrasive assholes simply because they don't understand "its not what you know, its who you know". My advice to them is to quit the job and start their own company. Never work for someone dumber than yourself. If you think you know everything, prove it.
Re:a lot of articles like this one these days (Score:3, Insightful)
In that very scenario, the marketing guy may be a complete idiot when he says "we have to have this out the door in a week", at which point you have the option of saying "you're a moron" or you can say "that'll cost us thousands in support calls". The marketing guy doesn't understand the engineer's perspective any better than the engineer understands the marketing guy's. And conversely, the marketing guy might be sitting there thinking it doesn't matter that it costs us thousands of dollars in support calls if we lose millions because there's a whole in the product line during the Christmas period. (A case where the engineer is an idiot.)
This is true of most cross-functional interactions within groups, the people on the lines don't fully understand the functions of people on different tasks, nor should they. But the point is that being bluntly and abusively frank without any filter isn't the same thing as being honest. It's not a PC cop-out to say something in nicer terms, but not everyone is wired to think before they speak.
From my experience, all things being equal (as in your dealing with moderately competent people and some exceptional people) it's generally just lack of understanding of the motivations and goals of the parties involved. I will admit that I have been very fortunate to work with many good teams of people.
Now, when things aren't equal, when you're dealing with exceptionals and incompetents, it's hard to judge. The trick is being able to determine if the exceptional are truly that, and where is the incompetence. You have to fix the problems.
I've worked in one sector where the customers paying for delivery did not have the knowledge and expertise to make informed decisions. They were in a situation where they relied solely on external contractors and consultants for all of their technical expertise and advice. The problem in this scenario was that it was almost impossible for the customer to differentiate good solid and reliable information from gibberish. I've seen a lot of incompetent engineers masking themselves as savants by throwing big technical terms at a customer who is too intimidated by their own ignorance to question the person they are paying to guide them.
And incompetence can surface anywhere, it's not solely the domain of marketing, management, engineering, or end users. The only way to defeat that is to find ways to quantify the impact of anything and everything. Then it's no longer a personal battle or an emotional one. And it's no longer your opinion that this or that person is incompetent. It doesn't matter what anyone's feelings are about something if you can produce numbers and say option A x dollars, option B y dollars.
Re:Not as smart as you think you are (Score:4, Insightful)
There are plenty of stupid people who lack wisdom, humility, and social skills; and smart people can learn these things at least as well as stupid people can.
They can, but my experience is that they often don't, because they're not compelled to. If someone is genuinely brilliant, other people are often willing to tolerate their less-admirable qualities because high intelligence is so uncommon. To some extent, I think it makes sense - it's very difficult to excel at multiple things (like some technical field *and* social skills) - but there should definitely be personal guidelines about how much of an allowance is given.
Re:Not as smart as you think you are (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst people that I have worked with had AMAZING people skills.
They could convince, seemingly rational people, of almost anything... regardless of glaring logical holes or inconsistencies.
They seemed to have some sort of narcissistic disorder and usually would trend projects towards whatever outcome would earn them the most dough or gratification with little regard to the success of the outcome.
I would take a few non-communicative geeks over a boatload of these asshats any day of the week, but then I do not work in Marketing so what the hell
Re:Not as smart as you think you are (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, in much the same way that it is with a beautiful woman or handsome man.