> In my experience, talented developers are usually intelligent enough that they can make up for their shortcoming in the social area by consciously adapting their behaviour.
That's orthogonal to the issue mentioned in the article. For the purposes of "not being a jerk", it doesn't matter if that comes naturally or if you have to devote conscious effort to it; only the resulting behavior matters.
> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.
Survivorship bias. Strange policies or properties are often found in successful companies/projects, who often write up articles about them as though those policies contributed to their success, never considering the possibility that they succeeded in spite of them. The same goes for jerks: some companies/projects succeed in spite of the jerks in (or running) them.
OTOH, you can make a pretty strong argument that for, say, MS, Oracle, or Apple, it's precisely the 'jerk-y' qualities of their founders and CEOs that led to their success today.
Say what you like about MS's business practices during the 90s, but I think the history shows that a large reason they were able to continue their dominance was because of the unfair and frankly anticompetitive practices that they embraced back then. Bill Gate's willingness to be a jerk was what kept their company on top.
Of course, that was directed productively and outward, not destructively inward.
> I think the history shows that a large reason they were able to continue their dominance was because of the unfair and frankly anticompetitive practices that they embraced back then
While there might be a correlation, I don't think you can entirely extrapolate between "ruthless business practices" and "toxic interpersonal interactions". You can have either without the other, and I wouldn't automatically assume that skill at one implies skill at the other.
Context is everything. Profanity and hyperbole are as far from the aloof and stuffy professional language one uses with unfamiliar people or those in higher positions. It's something that becomes appropriate in personally close and comfortable quarters, and it can be a signal of comradery.
fwiw that kind of phrase isn't necessarily 'jerky.' As long as the person you are saying it to understands that you respect him/her, and are just disagreeing with their idea, then it can be fine.
It's a risky communication strategy, but I wouldn't condemn everyone who uses it.
> As long as the person you are saying it to understands that you respect him/her
what kind of person would say that with full vitriolic sincerity to someone they respect? Why say that when you could say, "I strongly disagree for the following reasons..." or something else similarly diplomatic and actually productive?
Oh right, and I forgot Marc Andreesen. This was from The Hard Thing About Hard Things:
To: Marc Andreessen
Cc: Mike Homer
From: Ben Horowitz
Subject : Launch
I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy.
— Ben
To: Ben Horowitz
Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman)
From: Marc Andreessen
Subject: Re: Launch
Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is.We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault.
Most people can see through "I strongly disagree for the following reasons..." as a euphemism for "your idea is stupid, and this is why..." And the more you emphasize "strongly" in the former, the more likely "fucking" materializes between "is" and "stupid" in the latter.
That kind of bland vocabulary makes one's statements sound like limp static. Corporate dialect is contrived to remove strong (corporate-environment-inappropriate) emotion from your speech. If you're well acquainted with your colleagues, then I'd hope you could express yourself more genuinely. You're probably more relatable than a peppy talking head who never offends anyone.
In this cases, shouldn't the discussion be purely about the technical merits of the idea, rather than emotions of the people speaking about it? I would count removing unneeded emotions from the conversation as a positive thing.
I'm a machine learning engineer so "unneeded input" is something I rarely consider as a valid statement. Oftentimes when you're arguing the merits of one approach versus a different one, you have to use your rhetorical skills to influence another party. You both believe you have the best solution. You believe your logic is consistent and complete.
Emotion is a very powerful signal during discussion. It's a counterpoint to logic; they work together. Rarely does logic by itself win anyone over. Trying to remove "unneeded" (who decides what an unneeded emotion is) emotion is folly. We're not Vulcans.
So, all things being equal and arguments having the same merit, the less polite and less rational person wins. If i am able to contain emotions and argue by facts only, I will be at disadvantage.
Diplomacy is not always necessary to get productivity.
Tip-toeing around the issue can make things much worse.
It is much easier to say, "Stop. That's stupid, try again."
Than to try and cherrypick what they've done right, because often times, there isn't anything useful there.
Considering that Gates, Jobs, and Torvalds all have stories where they tell someone what they're doing is stupid, and actually get a decent product out at the end of the day, it doesn't seem like diplomacy is necessary at all.
If you can't say ~why~ it's "stupid," your comment is not useful. And if you do say why it's stupid, those reasons are much more important than the inflammatory adjective "stupid," so just say those instead.
It's hard to feel respected when you're constantly hearing all about how "fucking stupid" your ideas are. I know in theory you're supposed to separate criticism of your ideas from criticism of you, but in reality that isn't always easy when the statements being made are so strong.
Yeah, it's a risky strategy. I recently interviewed with a company that had "thick skin" as one of their hiring criteria, and told candidates that they insulted each other, and someone getting hired couldn't take things to seriously.
I'm willing to bet that there is a correlation, to some extent, of level of jerkiness one can tolerate and income. The more jerk you can tolerate, in many types of companies, the higher you can move up. (to a certain extent, above a certain threshold; and the correlation is probably stronger among larger companies.) Mostly due to shifting upwards and towards the business side of things; management, strategy/biz development, or what have you.
For example, the person who wrote this article, is less of a fit for a cutthroat, decisive, business-minded management position; and might maximize their relative potential (in their current situation and state) by reaching a level that's below any business-minded interactions.(captain of a development team, answers to a manager who isolates them from business/mean/jerkish discussions.)
Having worked at a company with very nice people and no fire to actually get things done (just platitudes), it can be just as bad of an environment if your goal is to succeed. Often times people come in to "play work" and achieve only a fraction of what's possible.
Fire and courtesy are hardly incompatible. But it's more than twice as hard to achieve both as to manage one or the other.
It's also a question of circumstance. Right now, for example, I'm working to mitigate, and eventually to resolve, a morale crisis on my team, which exists for good and cogent reasons that don't merit discussion here. Now is not the time for fire - and fire alone in any case works only when the vision is so powerful that smart, capable people will tolerate being driven painfully hard to achieve it. Without offering something to make that worthwhile, fire can't drive them onward - it can only drive them away.
Fire is not always the solution to any problem of course, but a lack of being results driven can make for large morale problems in itself - especially in engineering where you can keep working on one insignificant detail or another in perpetuity. I've spent months constantly asking for business goals to be set so we can meet them and being told to hang tight. I've left those companies because the environment becomes quite toxic over time, with the "true believers" believing that everything is going swimmingly because they don't have any pressure put on them, and the ones looking to accomplish things spinning their wheels fiercely in the mud.
In any case, I'm not trying to argue with you, and I hope I don't come across as if I were. It's just that I feel like there's a strong reaction in this thread to a bias, whether perceived or actual, on the part of the article author and in the direction of courtesy. So my purpose here is to sound a cautionary note, and attempt to keep visible in the discussion what I regard to be the nuance of the matter.
Especially since a lot of engineers default to brusqueness, which I totally understand while finding often counterproductive. It can work in a collegial setting, among secure peers who share mutual respect, but in any other context it just looks like asshole behavior - and that is exactly what it is.
To understand one's audience, and adjust one's persuasive style to suit, is a fundamental aspect of rhetoric, and given the ubiquity of office politics and the necessity thereof - a topic meriting its own essay, which I will not write on a phone - such understanding and adjustment is important to professional success, as well. I think that's something it is easy for us to overlook, because computers only need to be told and then sworn at, not persuaded.
Also, all else equal, it's both more ethically sound and more useful not to act like an asshole. Leaving a trail of hurt feelings behind you is no way to go through life. Sure, we might excuse it in someone with a vision on par with that of Steve Jobs. But no one here is on par with Steve Jobs.
In more ways than one. When jerks are allowed to be jerks, people who do not want to deal with jerks leave the company. So the jerks bubble up to the top, while otherwise great engineers who don't want to be berated move along to better things.
Exactly. You have to pick: either the jerks, or the people who the jerks drive away. And that doesn't take into account the people who aren't quite driven away but find work that much more unpleasant as a result.
If you encounter many skilled jerks, consider why that might be, and why in the same environment you don't also encounter skilled people who are fun to work with. In such an environment, the skilled people who are fun to work with can afford to leave, while some of the non-skilled people may not have that option. So, it's natural that within such an environment (company, project, etc), it'll look like a correlation between jerkiness and skill. People then start assuming a causation, and thus contribute to that same cycle.
The opposite environment, with many skilled people who are fun to work with, will tend to reject jerks regardless of skill. I've also noticed that such an environment tends to have a much higher degree of mentorship and collaboration, in addition to being more fun to work in, and boosting energy rather than draining it.
Entirely possible. But the viewer may also just be in an environment with skilled jerks that have driven off skilled non-jerks. So whether the viewer is a jerk, nice, or indifferent won't necessarily change the apparent correlation they observe around them between jerkiness and skill. The danger lies in generalizing that observation and assuming it applies outside that environment.
> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.
Survivorship bias doesn't render this an ineffective argument against the simple "no jerks" policy argued for in the article.
The contention is "(jerk present) → ¬ (success)", aka "¬ (jerk present) ∨ ¬ (success)". A single case of "(jerk present) ∧ (success)" is sufficient to disprove the direct implication.
> The contention is "(jerk present) → ¬ (success)"
The contention in the article is not "you can't ever succeed if you have a jerk on the team" or "a jerk will always cause your team to fail". A property doesn't have to be universal to be common enough to be worth writing about.
So no, a single instance of succeeding despite a jerk does not "disprove" anything relevant here.
> To me, the business of software development is way too complex to apply a simple "no jerks" policy. Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.
That's what you replied to with "but survivorship bias!". And the article itself says:
> A “no jerks” policy must be preached and practiced from the highest levels.
... which is a universal and normative call to action.
English isn't formal logic, and treating it as such creates a strawman. An article recommending a "no jerks" policy is not a formal theorem that "jerks universally lead to failure", nor can it be refuted and dismissed by an anecdote of "but we had jerks and didn't fail".
If jerks universally led to failure, it would hardly need writing about more than once, as everyone would very quickly have to understand and deal with it. However, because you can sometime succeed in spite of the presence of jerks, that makes it a problem particularly worth writing about.
That's orthogonal to the issue mentioned in the article. For the purposes of "not being a jerk", it doesn't matter if that comes naturally or if you have to devote conscious effort to it; only the resulting behavior matters.
> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.
Survivorship bias. Strange policies or properties are often found in successful companies/projects, who often write up articles about them as though those policies contributed to their success, never considering the possibility that they succeeded in spite of them. The same goes for jerks: some companies/projects succeed in spite of the jerks in (or running) them.