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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm the exception, but I have worked with someone as bad as the article described. He would re-write everyones code when they weren't around, because he didn't consider it good enough, so they were completely de-moralized. Eventually he was assigned solo projects, which became overly complex and were never finished, until he left the company. Management should have noticed earlier how unproductive he was to have around.

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That doesn't sound so much like a brilliant jerk as a midwit egomaniac, which are pretty common on the ground in programming. I've worked with people like that too, and what they're really doing under the guise of making your code better is rewriting modules because it's less trouble than figuring out how the existing code works. Invariably they break something in the rewrite, too, because they didn't understand the full scope of the problem domain (which, circling back, is why they didn't understand the original code).

And of course when you assign them to solo projects they fail. Because they're not very good at software development.

That's very well put. The "mid-wit egomaniac" is much more destructive than the "brilliant jerk." The jerk at least knows that rewriting working code is expensive and risky.

That's probably pretty accurate. He was really brilliant, and had extremely broad technical knowledge, but he was not as brilliant has he believed himself to be. Since his code was difficult for anyone else to follow, and as mentioned earlier, everything was over-engineered out of existence.

Success can be determined by many different things; but pretty universally in programming not getting the job done correctly (the expected inputs and outputs just aren't there) is an issue.

Which confirms your interpretation and labeling of the 'midwit egomaniac'.

The sad part - it is not usually immediately clear which kind of jerk your dealing with, since they behave the same!

Secondarily, it is not immediately clear to an outsider upon observation which is which either...

Summary I drew: There are genuine mental health related conditions that can cause someone to be a jerk AND still be brilliant. When you find that, you have to first separate them off so as not to detract from others work. Secondly if they can't cut it then let them go.

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