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Comment by thedevelopnik | Hacker News Reader

How did Dick not get fired long before if everyone thought he was terrible?

Oh right, that company did not learn the lesson of the first one, coding is not as important as being a decent person when it comes to building a team.

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I will never understand this logic. It doesn't matter how friendly someone is if they can't code, but even if someone is difficult to work with (as many smart computer programmers are) they can still be hugely important to a team's success. Obviously there are limits to both of these, but technical ability is the requirement and "being fun to work with" is the nice-to-have. I think highly socialized people tend to complain about non-social people much more than the reverse.

A highly technically skilled but anti-social team member can easily have negative productivity as they bring down (or drive out) everyone else in the team. This doesn't even require them to be an asshole: just being bad at communicating can do it (I have had such a coworker: nice, very technically skilled, completely useless as part of a team).

>drive out) everyone else in the team [by] just being bad at communicating

Wow. What exactly did he do that literally made everyone else quit? Surely there was a lot more than just "being bad at communicating".

Sure, not having any hard skills at all disqualifies, but at some point you are good enough to do work and the social ability becomes the bottleneck.

It is not about being fun to work with (this is a nice bonus, sure), but having the ability to communicate with and enable, mentor, help others or accept help and critique if necessary.

That's a good way of putting it. A lot of really smart people are held back by their inability to be pleasant enough to work with that people want to work with them, which is needed for teamwork, which is needed for large-scale projects to succeed.

I have had some colleagues who were so-so developers yet were the social and institutional glue that made the team productive.

I didn't play team sports as a kid so it took me a decade or so as a working adult to appreciate the difference between a high-function team and a collection of super smart individuals.

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