There's a picture that gets re-posted on LinkedIn periodically of Netflix's CTO Reed Hastings captioned with a quote attributed to him: "Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high." Although this is the sort of feel-good positive fluff that is perfect LinkedIn-bait, I can't help but notice that the people who re-post it and re-share it tend to be people who I remember personally as being mostly just regular jerks. Look, I know better than to characterize myself as "brilliant" on the internet (and I honestly don't think I am, although I do think I'm competent), two things I indisputably am are educated and experienced. Since the subjective words "talented" and "brilliant" and "rockstar" are usually used as a stand-in for the more objective but contentious terms educated and experienced, I can't help but think that somewhere in the back of their minds, they're including me in their list. The people in my network who re-post this platitude usually didn't like me very much because they found themselves in a sticky situation that they expected me to be able to get them out of. When you're educated and experienced, but you still can't solve somebody's crisis on the spot, they don't think, "oh, well, I was asking a lot", they think, "he could have helped me, but he didn't because he's a jerk who thinks he's too good for me".
If more than one person has thought you are a jerk, especially more than one at a single job, and you don't know why, you're probably a jerk. The classic sign of a jerk is someone who can't pinpoint why someone would think they are a jerk in the first place. Or worse, you know why but you just don't care.
As far as toxic workers go (jerks included), there are a lot of reasons they are toxic:
* They are negative all the time. They sap the enjoyment out of the room.
* They are highly critical of other's work. No one else has a problem with the work others are doing, they just nit-pick every little thing.
* They avoid hard work and only go after prestige projects. They'll try to push stuff like maintenance work onto others, and half-ass it when they have to do it.
* Anything they do wrong is met with a strong defense mechanism and a need to deflect into someone else.
I'm sure there's more, these are just off the top of my head. Contrary to belief, being 'brilliant' has absolutely nothing to do with whether someone can be toxic. I've met a few toxic people in software and out, and some were downright mediocre.
Maybe. (Actually, no, not, but for the sake of discussion). I have worked with people that would be considered "brilliant jerks" as in, they were amazing but they were so hard for most people to get along with that they actually were fired for being difficult to work with. It's never happened to me, but I've seen it happen maybe a half-dozen times to other people. What I couldn't help noticing about each of them was that: a) I never had any problem getting along with them. They just came down hard enough on the incompetent that they got a reputation for being unreasonable. b) there were people who were much, much more abusive, but not people that anybody would call "brilliant" (the opposite, in fact), who seemed to be applauded for their ability to anger people. The difference was that they people who got away with it always directed their arrogant attitude down, never up. It just seems to me that the more competent you're _perceived_ to be, the lower the threshold for bad behavior gets you labelled as a "jerk".
>It just seems to me that the more competent you're _perceived_ to be, the lower the threshold for bad behavior gets you labelled as a "jerk".
Yep. If the 80/20 rule is true(and I keep finding anecdotal evidence it is), then wouldn't the natural frustrations of the 20% doing the 80% simply be perceived as toxicity by the other 80% doing the remaining 20%?
Take a team of 10 people. If 8 people get together and decide to say the 2 top performers are "toxic"(by whatever metric that is defined), what chance do those 2 people have, even if they are doing 80% of the work?
The cost of "just being honest" over learning some subtlety.
I'm smart, I'm competent, I know what I'm doing, and, most importantly, I know how to get you to come along with me willingly.
If that fails, well, I know how to say something that only becomes devistating once I leave the room and I'm better friends with all your co-workers anyway. Come at me.
The people you saw fired lacked that final quality. They bought into the narrative that our field is a meritocracy and that's a downright lie. They poured all their effort into their skills and ego and left zero room for learning to navigate office politics. They deserved to be fired.
Having worked at Netflix, I can tell you the difference: An experienced person says "In my experience, this is the best way to go because of X, Y, and Z". A jerk says, "The best option is my way and if you do it any other way you're wrong and I don't have to justify myself to you because I'm that good."
In both cases what the person is suggesting is in fact the right way to go most of the time. The difference is whether or not you feel you're better than everyone else.
Being the smartest person in a room puts a lot of extra pressure and stress on you. Proving certain kinds of people wrong is hard. Doing it without upsetting them is even harder. After a while you just give up and either stop teaching people making you "toxic because he only cares about himself", or you give up trying to explain properly making you "toxic because he think we should just listen without proper explanations". Only solution is to leave and find smarter coworkers.
This sounds like a dangerous mindset to get into. If someone believes "I'm the smartest person here and nobody understands me" then I agree leaving right away is the best solution for everyone.
>"The best option is my way and if you do it any other way you're wrong and I don't have to justify myself to you because I'm that good."
...but if they've been with the service, let's say Netflix - as you eluded to, since it's inception, then I would think that they would know the answer far better than an engineer that's only been around a month or so.
What you're taking for arrogance might be the engineer simply stating that they've been around the block or two and, having had people try to discredit them before, they want to establish that their experience trumps someone else's own arrogance.
It's not the best way to put it, to be sure, but people have different ways of expressing themselves and/or different expectations of others.
The problem is two-fold: Understanding everyone's personalities and their expectations; and then using that knowledge to build channels of communications with those principles in mind.
If you haven't heard of Insights trainings[0], I highly suggest checking it out.
Anyways, so while one engineer might care about other things, which I might find arbitrary because I only care about the datasets (e.g.: something tangible), it doesn't mean that either of us are "wrong". Just because all I care about is the data surrounding a bug defect doesn't mean I'm an asshole, compared to someone who cares about the end-uer's experience. We're simply driven by different aspirations.
The same goes for your jerk engineer. Maybe they're tired of people trying to disprove their statements and tack on the, "I'm that good" at the end precisely because they're tired of the bullshit, A-type personality shit that comes with everyone trying to one-up them to look cool. Or maybe they're actually a jerk. I don't even pretend to claim to know.
...but immediately attributing malice, where other answers can just as easily suffice, does everyone a disservice because you don't rely on communication to understand the why behind whatever was said. You take this assumption you've made, let it create a bias, and then that bias affects your interactions with them.
All of that could've easily been avoided by a simple, "Hey, man (or chica or your flavour of vernacular), I wanted to ask what's up and see if you knew/understood/comprehend/what-have-you how what you said came across when...." A lot of the times, you'll probably find that they had no intention of it sounding like that but 'x' was on their mind or some other factor was in play. You could also find out that they are, indeed, a jerk; but that would, at the very least, be a confirmation and not just an assumption, yeah?
Anyways, this was a long, fuck-all, pointless diatribe to say that someone might come across to you as a feckwad but it doesn't - implicitly - mean that that's who they are, in their day-to-day.
I've experienced people I thought were arrogant as feckall, until I had 1:1's with them and got to know their personalities and perspective a lot better. Once I understood where they were coming from and how they think and/or react to things, I could tailor my behaviour better towards their personalities and they could do the same in kind.
There's a picture that gets re-posted on LinkedIn periodically of Netflix's CTO Reed Hastings captioned with a quote attributed to him: "Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to teamwork is too high." Although this is the sort of feel-good positive fluff that is perfect LinkedIn-bait, I can't help but notice that the people who re-post it and re-share it tend to be people who I remember personally as being mostly just regular jerks. Look, I know better than to characterize myself as "brilliant" on the internet (and I honestly don't think I am, although I do think I'm competent), two things I indisputably am are educated and experienced. Since the subjective words "talented" and "brilliant" and "rockstar" are usually used as a stand-in for the more objective but contentious terms educated and experienced, I can't help but think that somewhere in the back of their minds, they're including me in their list. The people in my network who re-post this platitude usually didn't like me very much because they found themselves in a sticky situation that they expected me to be able to get them out of. When you're educated and experienced, but you still can't solve somebody's crisis on the spot, they don't think, "oh, well, I was asking a lot", they think, "he could have helped me, but he didn't because he's a jerk who thinks he's too good for me".