No they don't; mediocre 'nice guys' do though. Every 'brilliant jerk' I've worked with and led has been a net positive over the long haul. Every mediocre nice guy has been dead weight that costs everyone around them time.
I'll take the brilliant jerk any day. They can simply deliver in ways that others cannot.
> I'll take the brilliant jerk [over the mediocre nice guy] any day.
Holy false dichotomy, Batman. I'd rather take neither of them and fill my team with adequate-to-exceptional devs who also happen to be decent human beings.
I didn't say there's no middle ground. Of course I'd prefer the brilliant nice guy, but you don't always have that option.
I disagree on 'adequate' though. I'll take a truly brilliant a-hole over 'adequate'. 'Adequate' means I'm often fixing their mistakes, checking up on them, making sure they stay on track, etc. I'm ok with smoothing over issues from time to time if it means I can let them run wild on the thing I hired them for.
If you believe that niceness (the opposite of a jerk?) and brilliance are independently varying traits, and that each are sought after in the market, then you might suspect that eventually those who have the greatest number of independently varying good traits will be more likely to be sniped up by discerning firms than not.
In which case, based on your budget, you'll have to settle with fewer and fewer desirable traits of lesser magnitude, or conversely, based on your budget, you can push more and more less desirable humans to lesser firms; one can imagine thinking the same with customers or clients as well.
You can have the nice paying client, or the jerk paying client, and a discerning firm might prefer nice paying clients over jerk paying clients (but of course, the most important discernment will be over pay), leading their competitors to have to deal with clients with a smaller set of desirable traits.
If brilliant means not mediocre, or above average, they are as rare as they are common. Depends how your budget stretches; If it doesn't, you have to make do.
Same here. The so-called "jerks" are still just people and leadership is all about managing different personalities. I've yet to encounter a case where the even the most difficult person couldn't be handled properly. Any occasional issues are more than worth the productivity increases.
Says who? This has never been my experience. They are tolerated specifically because they deliver. If they're not delivering then why are they still around?
If your head count is 5 or less, one brillian jerk (BJ) can carry the team on his shoulders. If BJ's a 10x programmer, and the other option is to hire a brillian and nice (BN) who's merelly an 8x programmer, you are better off with the BJ as tech lead. Assume your core team was 5x, 4x and 2x before the hiring of the tech lead. The 4x and 2x guys will probably slow down BN to 6x, so you end up with 17x of team throughput. BJ, on the other hand will make 2x quit out of frustration, and 4x will be demoted to 2x because he will struggle to cope. 5x, on the other hand, is pushed beyond his zone of comfort and raises to 6x. Now you have a team throughput of 18x, but you will be paying one less (junior) salary.
That extra throughput is also better spent because instead of 4 people discussing how to do things, there's 1 jerk bossing around 2 non-jerks. Cancel all team meetings!!!
Now, make the team size 15. Most of those will be 3x and 2x programmers as well. Seeded with a 5x, two 4x and the village idiot (VI, whom we will peg at 0.5x, just for the Lulz). So, the BJ has the VI kicked out, starts making much neglected changes, and everything seems to be going in the right direction. But then, your rank and file get demoted -1x because they also cannot cope with BJ's rapid changes. BJ might be seen as keeping the boat afloat, but in reality his productivity is neglected by everybody else's fuckups (which are BJ fault, because he cannot be bothered to let the team know what he's doing). 5x and one of the 4xs quit in disgust of the general chaos, and 6 months later, they are back with a competing product and poaching the big team clients.
So, it does not sound as if BJ "delivers" as much as you thought, does it?
>So, it does not sound as if BJ "delivers" as much as you thought, does it?
I guess not, at least, within the context of your little story.
To be fair, I am thinking of small teams, and I can imagine how their value would decline in larger outfits.
That said, I don't hire people to write CRUD apps either. Truly brilliant people should be working on solving hard problems which lack a general solution, not data layers and library duct tape.
I'll take the brilliant jerk any day. They can simply deliver in ways that others cannot.