
When Smart People are Bad Employees - mbrubeck
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-employees/
======
Stormbringer
From the article:

 _"Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and
being an excellent member of the team."_

Translation: keep your head down, don't rock the boat and don't have any
passion for what you do. This is the recipe for 'success' (i.e. continued
employment) at big companies.

 _"As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super engaged employees who can
identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them. However,
sometimes really smart employees develop agendas other than improving the
company."_

No. These so called 'agendas' don't just mysteriously appear. What happens is
that the big company goes to great lengths to hire smart people, and then even
greater lengths to ignore them. At this point, the smart employee has two
options (1) stay or (2) leave.

From sarahmccrum's comment in this thread: _"I saw that most of the clever
people who were around left, often when they were most needed"_

That's the second scenario, the smart person says "screw it" and leaves.
Sometimes that is the most mature decision. If some behaviour that is bad for
the company is deeply engrained, is it really worth the futile tilting at
windmills quest to get it changed? Perhaps they have gone on such crusades
before only to get burnt (at the stake).

In the first scenario, where they stay, what are they going to do? They can
(a) decide to ignore the thing that is bad for the company, (b) decide to keep
banging their head against the wall in the same way, (c) escalate - by trying
to change the way that they communicate the seriousness of the problem or the
audience (brass didn't listen, maybe the grass(roots) will?).

(a) shows low levels of motivation or commitment to the company (but hey,
apparently that is a good thing so long as you hide it (sarcasm)),
additionally, it can be genuinely difficult for smart people to ignore
situations that are sub-optimal. If you're a programmer and your job basically
boils down to 'fix things' ... it is very hard to draw the line and not try to
fix a broken process. It is that itch that needs to be scratched.

(b) is just going to continue to get them ignored, or perhaps labelled as 'not
a team player'. Way to go corporate culture. Eventually they'll get fired or
tired and switch to a different strategy.

(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is
fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to
make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will
save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with
low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out
meme...

...consider if you will the problem of identifying exactly who the people are
to get on board with the change. Power flows in strange ways in big companies,
it isn't always just a linear thing directly from the top to the bottom. In my
experience it is almost _never_ linear.

Identifying the true power structure in a corporation (for a particular change
that is required) is _enormously difficult_. Moreover, the underlying power
structure can change depending on what the problem is, or over time, or any of
many different variables can effect what the true power structure is on day X
for problem Y. Becoming a better communicator is practically _trivial_
compared to the problem of identifying the correct power structure to address
the problem.

So you might think the moral of the story is that geeks need to become better
communicators. But NO! Certainly not! Becoming a better communicator is the
path to either management or architecture, neither of which is a fate that I
would wish on anybody.

For the smart person stuck in a stupid situation, the smart thing is just to
move on. It doesn't matter that you are not loyal to the company, you gave it
a good shot. Try to leave on good terms (itself a marketing problem (blah blah
professional development etc)). Loyalty doesn't matter, because the company
has _zero_ loyalty to you. And true loyalty _must_ be bi-directional.

~~~
kahawe
It is really sad how relevant and spot on your analysis is. I have moved from
a small typical 10-15 guys IT shop to a well established national player in
private banking and it is unbelievable how crippling and exhausting work is
there - but I am working much fewer hours for a much better pay. The attrition
of daily 9-5 not-project work, all "serious business" and no "play" is
horrible for even a mildly creative person in a typical "knowledge work"
position...

And I love how even big corporations are usually presented as if they were
making clear cut, sensible and rational decisions based on facts. This could
not further from the truth.

Too bad you only find out about that once you actually start working a real
job - nobody gives you that truth in university.

~~~
Stormbringer
(this is part 2, should have posted it first, D'oh!)

Large organizations can breed certain kinds of psychotic behaviour, such as
out and out lying. Your boss (or someone else with power) may order you to do
one thing, and then next week demand to know why you haven't done some other
thing. You say "because you told me to do X" and they tell you they never said
such a thing. Never ever _ever_ trust that person again. Never leave yourself
vulnerable. Never take anything they say at face value. But... here's the rub,
they are in a position of power, so don't piss them off. I think there's an
old saying - something about being wise as serpents yet gentle as doves, and
that definitely applies here. As a non-pyschotic behaviour, this might arise
because there are multiple people giving contradictory orders, I believe there
are other old saying about the difficulty of pleasing all the people all of
the time.

One of the reasons that banking projects frequently fail, and this boggles the
mind, is that, no matter how important your project is to the organization,
within the company there are people who are actively trying to kill your
project. They will oppose you at every turn, they will fight you tooth and
nail, they will (seemingly arbitrarily) deny you of perfectly reasonable
requests for resources.

As an aside: working at large banks is the reason I bought my own white board
marker, it lives in my bag, and I take it home with me every night.

So I considered this behaviour. Now I choose to believe that for most people
they don't get up every morning, look themselves in the mirror and ask
themselves how they can do the most damage to the company they work for, how
they can be the most evil, how they can maximise suffering in the world. Most
people aren't like that. So why then, are all these people trying to kill my
projects? After a long period of contemplation I came to the understanding
that the reason they act that way is usually because the company incentivises
them to do so. Their role, for instance, may be to minimise costs. Projects
are a cost. Therefore your project is directly in their gun-sights. This is
just one example, large corporations are really good at creating and
incentivising infighting. They might decide to engage in a silo based re-org.
And then afterwards, none of the silos want to pay for essential projects,
because they hope that someone else will be forced to stump up the bill. Now
the organization didn't set out to create that outcome, but it is just basic
game theory (prisoner's dilemma) that defecting is the best (short term)
outcome for individuals (whereas co-operation is the best outcome for groups).

Make friends with the people who have good people skills, they will protect
you in times of trouble. It doesn't matter how crap the business analysts are
(and most are worse than useless) if you can be bothered to put in a minimal
amount of effort to be nice to them, and they like you, you can often get
enough warning to dodge a bullet or to get passed a teleport token at the last
minute.

You'll run across some people who are genuinely bad at their jobs. (see also
business analysts (caveat: a _good_ business analyst is worth their weight in
gold, treat them with the same care and respect you would a national
treasure)) Try not to make them look bad. At one large bank I ran into a DBA
and she was complaining that the queries were running too slowly. So I (tongue
firmly in cheek) suggested that if all the data was bought into one really
huge table the query would run really fast because there wouldn't be any
joins... and she thought this was great advice. I freaked out. I ended up
begging her not to do this. It turns out she'd never even heard of
normalisation because it was her first job as a DBA _and she'd never been
given any training_. //twitch// Don't make the little people look bad if you
can avoid it. Don't stomp on the ants.

Things move at a certain pace, try not to get impatient. Try to find something
to do that looks like work, that you can justify as work but that you enjoy
doing. I always like doing design and testing, I give my code an absolute
beating before I let anyone else near it, no abuse they throw at it will come
close to the torture I put it through. Unfortunately, in the long run this
means I end up finishing much faster than most of my co-workers (whoops). So I
often end up helping out other programmers. That might be debugging or if
they're stuck on some task that they hate (examples: UI or persistence) then I
ask them what they _like_ doing, and if I have something like that on my task
list I can swap with them.

For the keeping yourself busy: develop an appreciation for doing the
impossible, whether by sneaky solutions, your astounding application of some
obscure API or comp-sci algorithm, or just outright cheating. Volunteer for
stuff. Banks have lots of old code that needs the occassional fix. Put your
hand up even if the code that needs fixing is in some obsolete dead language
that nobody speaks anymore (exception: Cobol, just don't go there. Besides,
the old timers need the work anyway). Document your achievements and then
squirrel away the document. At your annual performance review print them all
out and walk into your bosses office with a dead tree's worth of work you did
over and above the call of duty.

If you're good at fixing bugs, keep track of how many you fixed compared to
everyone else. Same goes for anything else you are really good at that can be
tracked. If you think you're really good at something, and it turns out there
is someone out there who is better than you, make friends with them and
(subtly) get mentoring from them. Yes, they may be hyper-intelligent, but
often it will turn out that they just know more tricks than you.

Programming is fundamentally both a social phenomenon and simultaneously a
solo activity. Your non-programmer boss is never really going to appreciate
your amazing algorithms, because he has no baseline to compare it to. Talking
to other programmers and swapping war stories is really important to their and
your motivation. Most programmers who don't get this are starved of attention
and feel unloved. You need to realise that the attention you crave comes not
from above, but from your peers, and the best praise is from programmers that
are better than you.

Most importantly about making friends with programmers that are better than
you, is that maybe at some point you'll get the opportunity to work on a
startup as a low digit employee, because they know you, they know they can
trust you, and they know you get things done.

~~~
kahawe
Great and valuable read! Is that from your blog or did you write a book? Would
love to see more!

Now here is where that last part is really funny in my situation: most
everyone of my peers could easily be my mom or dad, they are all way older
than me, got family and kids, so there are no after work activities at all,
there is no typical coffee room or balcony for smokers where you would
"naturally" meet and talk to people, we do deal with different departments as
our customers but 95% of them are in that "way older" group too.

Don't get me wrong, I am not one of those young whippersnappers ragging on
"old people"; far from it, I am well approaching my 30s faster than I shall
like and there are "older than me" people who can really open your eyes with
some fascinating stories or experiences! I just find them here all unnaturally
passionless, whining and downright boring somehow... not a lot of professional
expertise where you could actually LEARN something. More times than not, it is
me (from the outside) giving them an idea or suggestion based on technical
knowledge. And I have just been here for maybe 3 or 4 years now... most
everyone else has been here 10-20+ years.

And I'm the "expert" in my small little local kingdom so, sadly, what I say
just goes and there really honestly is practically no one I could get
mentoring from, even I don't consider myself that "good" at all, I still am
the go-to guy and have always been that everywhere I worked at.

I know my weakness, I know I don't really excel and come up with incredibly
creative, sweet solutions.. I guess I am just good enough to know how bad I am
and still manage to do well enough.

------
ohyes
"The Heretic: Specifically, he builds his case that the company is hopeless
and run by a bunch of morons."

Statistically speaking, the employee is probably right. But at most companies,
building a case for this is an exercise in tautology. Maybe take him seriously
and at least make it look like you are being proactive about his issues.

"The Flake: ... he completed the project in 72 hours." He did two weeks of
coding in 3 days. If he doesn't show up for the next two weeks, and the
product had no major flaws, who cares?

Drug addiction and mental disorder are a separate issue, in my opinion. If he
is really as good as it seemed, it would have behooved the employer to get him
into rehab/psychological treatment.

"The Jerk: ...sounds like House M.D." WHY did you put someone with no people
skills in a management position? (Senior management to boot). It makes very
little sense. Someone who is a jerk isn't going to be good at managing people.
A jerk could be a great individual contributor, as long as the jerk does his
work correctly.

I feel like it is more about making the right concessions given the
individual, and making sure you don't put people into positions where their
faults are amplified.

An analogy to this post would be finding that a puzzle piece doesn't go where
you want to put it, and therefore declaring that it is a bad puzzle piece
(even though it fits somewhere else just fine).

------
bugsy
You know, I bet the cocaine fiend guy wasn't even on cocaine. How would the
company know this? If they had insurance coverage and he went into rehab it
would be seriously violation of medical privacy for this to be revealed to the
company. If he did go into rehab, the article author would have mentioned it
given that he claims to know all about the guy's cocaine habit as well as his
mental health history, which he is now disclosing in public. Boy I would hate
to have a former employer get on the internet and post articles about how they
think I have a cocaine addiction. I suspect it was all speculation, and
probably wrong. Though when cornered, to save face, the author would likely
deny all this and claim to have proof.

I took that one a bit personally myself as I could relate to it. Let me tell
you how that went down with me. Went to work for a company, gave it my all.
Did in 3 days what took other employees six months, and with fewer bugs and
faster performance. The company rode me hard, demanded I worked more and more.
Soon I was responsible for nearly all the critical projects. I was working 16
hours a day 7 days a week. My boss refused to let me even take Sundays off
because of the crisis. Yet my salary was based on 40 hrs a week, no overtime,
so when I figured my effective hourly rate if I was a hourly worker, it was
less than I could make in fast food. Finally after a year of this I cracked
and got very sick, suffering total exhaustion. I could not come in to work.
The work then fired me. I later hear them tell people they suspected I had a
drug problem.

So yeah, maybe I was even the guy he is talking about. Who knows. There were
no drugs though.

That was the first couple jobs out of college. After that I wised up and
started setting boundaries. But eventually I had to strike out on my own
because too many companies will take advantage of diligent workers.

Looking back at it all I see it like a rich guy that buys an expensive race
horse and then runs the horse in every race he can find without rests between
until the race horse collapses, and then he sends the horse off to the glue
factory with no loyalty to what the horse won him. Another example is the
spoiled trust fund kid that buys a ferrari and drives it around and never
changes the oil and after a year the engine freezes up, a total loss. This is
just stupidity and failure to manage your investment properly. There are a lot
of managers out there like this. Any company that routinely requires overtime
is a company that has failed and is run by incompetent management. When the
overtime is required of employees who don't even get paid overtime it makes
the whole thing just that more abusive and exploitative. This all is
especially absurd for those of us that produce at 10-30 times the rate and
quality of the average developers. I always would find it infuriating to be
told I must work 112 hours in a week during which I would write some 8,500
lines of complex code and there is another guy paid the same who writes 13
lines in the same week and goes home after 40 hours because his contributions
aren't all that important anyway so no point in keeping him late.

Anyone in this situation do as I did. Leave and start your own company.

~~~
droz
Sounds like you established the baseline of "3 days what took other employees
six months". Work is not a sprint, it's a marathon and you have to know how to
pace yourself.

------
sarahmccrum
I once had an employer who seemed (to me) to prefer people who were (in my
opinion) pretty inappropriate for their jobs because they had so little
ability to do them. I found it very difficult to understand at the time,
because I generally like to have people around who are better than me at most
things, so I can concentrate on what I do best.

It was interesting over the years, though, to see what happened. That
particular employer was a great believer that anyone can learn anything, and
she was incredibly patient with some people who really were not gifted at all
in their area of work.

Above all she valued loyalty (and in key areas, such as finance, she preferred
absolute stupidity). I learned a lot from her. I saw that most of the clever
people who were around left, often when they were most needed, whereas the
slower, more loyal people were still there getting the job done. I also
learned that loyalty and commitment are more valuable than brilliance. I saw
that she liked stupid people in sensitive areas because then they couldn't
mess up in any serious way. They made lots of small mistakes but they didn't
have the ability to make big mistakes and they always asked whenever they
didn't understand what they were doing.

Personally I think there is a balance here. I would find it hard to go as far
as she did, but it certainly caused me to look at people decisions in a
different way, which I would never have come up with if I hadn't seen her in
action.

~~~
keeptrying
This is very true. I've seen it at all levels of BigCo.

Loyalty is the single most important quality in a bigCo and it works
(unfortunately).

~~~
S_A_P
The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo-

\- I don't watch or care to talk sports. \- I don't / won't hunt wildlife. \-
I don't discuss female anatomy freely.

I live in Houston, so most big employers are energy related. It is still
somewhat of a good ol boy network and even though I'm now at a small company I
see all 3 in equal parts quite often.

~~~
forensic
>The reasons I won't be an exec at a bigCo-

..in Texas

~~~
jfornear
I've worked in Texas oil, have many friends who still do, and have even
visited extensively with a very successful oil exec in Houston...

S_A_P's generalizations aren't fair at all.

That exec I met had a Harvard MBA, 20 years experience at his company (where
he started out entry-level), extensive market knowledge/expertise, integrity,
strong character, etc. Qualities that actually matter when billions of dollars
are on the line.

Not sure why I even bothered to chime in.

------
daimyoyo
There is another important example that the author didn't mention. The
inquisitor. Anyone who's been in the workforce long enough knows the guy who
can't ever accept the directions he gets without questioning every aspect of
the decision. Also, this person tends to have a problem with authority and
will always test his or her boundaries. That said they tend to be among the
most creative thinkers in the entire company and for that reason they can be
an important member of the staff.

~~~
keeptrying
This kind of guy usually needs to lead or he is probably smarter than everyone
else in the room.

~~~
dpritchett
Quite so. The project manager comes to you with an underoptimized set of step-
by-step instructions; you help him to give you a minimal set of defensible
business goals instead.

Next step: meet those goals in the most effective way you know how.

------
jeremymcanally
I think this entry could just as easily be renamed "When People are Bad
Employees." I've encountered people that fit these profiles and wouldn't
classify them as particularly clever.

------
Nobido
This is interesting. I just finished listening to an old episode of This
American Life about this same subject.

[http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/370/r...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/370/ruining-it-for-the-rest-of-us) (it's the prologue if you
want to listen)

the story was about an experiment that was done to test the effects of these
same three personality types on a working environment (although they called
the flake the slacker, and the heretic was a bit different ,as the depressive)

To do this they repeatedly inserted an actor who would display one of these
behaviors into a working group and study the outcome - and groups with any
kind of disruptive co worker ended up doing considerably worse on their
projects. Also interesting, the other members of the group took on the traits
of the actor... When he was acting a jerk, the others in the group became rude
not only to the jerk but to each other. When he was the slacker, everyone else
started slacking more also. And when he was the depressive everyone else
became more depressed.

The only time the actor did not effect the groups performance was in one team
where a particularly charismatic member was able to diffuse all situations
where he was being a jerk.

------
Legion
Is the layout of this site borked for any other Chrome users?

Looks fine in Firefox, but the layout (sidebar & header) are gone in (my)
Chrome OS X. Want to be sure it's not a script-blocking or ad-blocking plugin
doing it (I think I disabled them all).

~~~
zebseven
Looks fine to me.

------
greattypo
This post was great.. when I read it 2 months ago

~~~
HelloBeautiful
What do you mean? You think it should not be mentioned ever again?

~~~
rdl
I wish there were a way to bring topics back and still retain the link to the
previous discussion. Maybe years later, there would be new insight into this
topic, but for a lot of stuff, the comments of 2 months ago are just as valid
as anything you'd say today.

searchyc is great, but no one really finds new comments buried on old posts
now. For topics which have lasting value (vs "what will apple release
tomorrow"), some kind of curated repository of interesting articles would be
great.

~~~
bartonfink
Would it make sense for HN to do something like the following?

Pull link out of submission and check database to see if that link has already
been submitted. If it has, either automatically insert a comment containing
links to the older discussion(s) OR append those links to the post itself?

It's going to be fairly brittle, because you're only comparing the addresses
and not the values stored, but it seems like it wouldn't need too much work.
Anyone have any thoughts?

------
clistctrl
Here's the previous conversation about this post:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416>

~~~
ericHosick
This was becoming way too Déjà vu for me. I thought I was loosing it. Thanks
for the link to the previous conversation.

------
farout
(c) is the 'problem'. Smart people aren't always good sales people. And it is
fundamentally a sales problem, where they need to identify the right people to
make the change, and then sell them on the idea (by convincing them they will
save money, and that it was their idea in the first place). Now the geeks with
low social skills is a common cliché, lets ignore that tired and played out
meme...

>>I used to be in sales . I have made millions for companies. Sales was easy
since I was helping people with pain they already knew and were looking to
remove it. I also wanted them to feel good about the company so they would
tell all their friends. Referral are sweet!

It always frustrated me that I could not sell management many of my ideas.
Part of the problem was they saw no problem. Lying to customers. No problem.
Screwing up services. No problem. Etc.

I got tired of it. That is why I now program.

