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Comment by possibilistic | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like he doesn't enjoy cocky, arrogant behavior. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Maybe his personality is orthogonal to that which he surrounds himself by...

I think this issue has more to do with personality than "culture".

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I don't know; to me it sounds like he got himself into the wrong profession. He's not the least bit passionate about his work.

You seem to be confusing passion with talent / ability / skill. Perhaps he's very very good at it... It's the thing he is best at. Should he not do something he is great, for the sake of argument, at just because he doesn't have passion for it?

He's definitely hurting both himself and the people he works with, both from the fact that he's not likely to work to improve himself, and from his depression/frustration and the fact that it's manifesting as resentment towards his coworkers. I don't mean to attack him, it's just that in collaborative work that requires skill (read: practice), a bad team member can be worse than having one too few. If it really is what he's best at, then he really needs to start practicing something he actually does enjoy, or find some way to enjoy it enough to practice.

To an extent you must be "cocky" to be great at...anything. Who is going to trust an engineer who questions his ability? Plus, people think about their job when they go home because they truly love their job, this guy seems to have had a negative outlook on it from the very beginning.

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