He has a job - for now. That guy is famously hard to work with, and colleagues are always trying to shuffle him off to another department and managers get exasperated trying to mediate all the conflicts he’s involved with and when the RIFs hit, guess who’s on the chopping block?
Everyone in those places is good enough at math. But only one is a fucking asshole.
My perception might be tainted by personal experience. If you’re good at math and easy to work with, you’re golden, but between ok at math/easy to work with and great at math/terrible to work with, in my experience the former is let go before the latter. To a certain extent it makes sense, wether it’s publish or perish in academia or maximizing profit in the corporate world, you end up prioritizing the “best” and brightest.
Are you in academia? This has not remotely been my experience in private industry.
Social skills pretty much trump all in engineering. If you write the most hyper efficient machine code, it will be a bitch to maintain and costs the team 10x as much going forward, but if you write code empathetically so that a normal human can pick it up, understand it, and fix it easily, then everyone will love you.
Same thing back when I was in physical engineering, you could have a brilliant idea for a design, but if you can’t communicate why it’s brilliant and why it’s worth getting everyone else to change to accomodate it, then it will get shot down.
Yes this is something I drill into more junior engineers as much as possible - Simplicity is a design consideration. Your designs need to convey what they are doing as clearly, intuitively, and simply as possible. You invented some new thing that automated everything? Congrats, the next person that needs to do a modification or read the drawing to react to an emergency is definitely going to break it, possibly even hurt themselves. Whenever I look at a drawing I can very quickly tell the quality of an engineer by how intuitive the drawing is - and for the quality of the notes they left when they had to do something complex
Glad to hear that hasn’t been your experience. I’ve been in both now, but I’ve seen people I wouldn’t spit at if on fire get funding or positions because of the work they produce. A guy known for making grad students cry has a line out the door because people want to be associated with him. He’s got the funding and pull to make things happen because he’s good at what he does, despite being an impossible prick. I think part of it is that there are very few people of the caliber that people will excuse that behavior from. Not every smart person with a bad attitude gets a pass, but in my experience, there’s a threshold past which people will excuse a lot. I think there’s a similar thing with money. Not every millionaire can get what they want, but at a certain point of wealth they just can. I totally understand if that’s not a universal experience. I was just offering my perspective.
We have had very different experiences. Social trumps all in RIF discussions. Your boss’s boss ('s boss’s boss) is the one that made the decision and all he knows is that you organized the potluck last year and are always in-office. He doesn’t even know the math guy’s name.
Yea, that’s completely valid. I imagine personal experience affects this a lot, but I’m glad to see people’s experiences have been contrary to what I imagine this woman has likely encountered. Not that anything excuses letting your child’s emotional and interpersonal development languish. She’s a terrible influence, regardless of if she was correct.
It’s also notable that the math guy has extra power in highly technical startups. This has resulted in Silicon Valley placing very high value on him compared to more mature businesses and industries. The brilliant asshole is more of a liability than an asset at GE, they’ll be fine without him (ok they won’t, but the MBAs made it so they wouldn’t be fine with him). The size of the venture heavily limits how much benefit a single engineer can provide, and a culture of putting up with it can result in hefty lawsuits.
But he does know that guy because he’s the one that sends him emails about how rule 46 of the employee manual is not being applied in regards to the Christmas present that Doris got for the cleaning lady, or the endless bickering when he gets passed up for promotion.
Problem is, he ends up on a bunch of the things that are necessary but boring/unpleasant. So he ends up being the basement troll you can’t fire or else the whole company will collapse
We have that guy at my work. Even his teammates actively avoid tasks that involve having to deal with him, so he largely works alone as a result. The worst part is that his boss for whatever reason refuses to do anything about it even when he can see the grief the guy causes to mutiple teams in our org. I bet if his boss was someone else, dude would’ve already been RIF’d.
Does it?
He has a job - for now. That guy is famously hard to work with, and colleagues are always trying to shuffle him off to another department and managers get exasperated trying to mediate all the conflicts he’s involved with and when the RIFs hit, guess who’s on the chopping block?
Everyone in those places is good enough at math. But only one is a fucking asshole.
My perception might be tainted by personal experience. If you’re good at math and easy to work with, you’re golden, but between ok at math/easy to work with and great at math/terrible to work with, in my experience the former is let go before the latter. To a certain extent it makes sense, wether it’s publish or perish in academia or maximizing profit in the corporate world, you end up prioritizing the “best” and brightest.
Are you in academia? This has not remotely been my experience in private industry.
Social skills pretty much trump all in engineering. If you write the most hyper efficient machine code, it will be a bitch to maintain and costs the team 10x as much going forward, but if you write code empathetically so that a normal human can pick it up, understand it, and fix it easily, then everyone will love you.
Same thing back when I was in physical engineering, you could have a brilliant idea for a design, but if you can’t communicate why it’s brilliant and why it’s worth getting everyone else to change to accomodate it, then it will get shot down.
Yes this is something I drill into more junior engineers as much as possible - Simplicity is a design consideration. Your designs need to convey what they are doing as clearly, intuitively, and simply as possible. You invented some new thing that automated everything? Congrats, the next person that needs to do a modification or read the drawing to react to an emergency is definitely going to break it, possibly even hurt themselves. Whenever I look at a drawing I can very quickly tell the quality of an engineer by how intuitive the drawing is - and for the quality of the notes they left when they had to do something complex
Glad to hear that hasn’t been your experience. I’ve been in both now, but I’ve seen people I wouldn’t spit at if on fire get funding or positions because of the work they produce. A guy known for making grad students cry has a line out the door because people want to be associated with him. He’s got the funding and pull to make things happen because he’s good at what he does, despite being an impossible prick. I think part of it is that there are very few people of the caliber that people will excuse that behavior from. Not every smart person with a bad attitude gets a pass, but in my experience, there’s a threshold past which people will excuse a lot. I think there’s a similar thing with money. Not every millionaire can get what they want, but at a certain point of wealth they just can. I totally understand if that’s not a universal experience. I was just offering my perspective.
We have had very different experiences. Social trumps all in RIF discussions. Your boss’s boss ('s boss’s boss) is the one that made the decision and all he knows is that you organized the potluck last year and are always in-office. He doesn’t even know the math guy’s name.
Yea, that’s completely valid. I imagine personal experience affects this a lot, but I’m glad to see people’s experiences have been contrary to what I imagine this woman has likely encountered. Not that anything excuses letting your child’s emotional and interpersonal development languish. She’s a terrible influence, regardless of if she was correct.
It’s also notable that the math guy has extra power in highly technical startups. This has resulted in Silicon Valley placing very high value on him compared to more mature businesses and industries. The brilliant asshole is more of a liability than an asset at GE, they’ll be fine without him (ok they won’t, but the MBAs made it so they wouldn’t be fine with him). The size of the venture heavily limits how much benefit a single engineer can provide, and a culture of putting up with it can result in hefty lawsuits.
then your boss’s boss renames it copilot app
But he does know that guy because he’s the one that sends him emails about how rule 46 of the employee manual is not being applied in regards to the Christmas present that Doris got for the cleaning lady, or the endless bickering when he gets passed up for promotion.
That guy stands out. And not in a good way.
Problem is, he ends up on a bunch of the things that are necessary but boring/unpleasant. So he ends up being the basement troll you can’t fire or else the whole company will collapse
We have that guy at my work. Even his teammates actively avoid tasks that involve having to deal with him, so he largely works alone as a result. The worst part is that his boss for whatever reason refuses to do anything about it even when he can see the grief the guy causes to mutiple teams in our org. I bet if his boss was someone else, dude would’ve already been RIF’d.
The problem is all of those things are generally not enough for management to do the very basic documentation required to fire a person.
People like that often end up getting promoted to a position that doesn’t interfere with the team.