

Are Quirky Developers Brilliant or Dangerous? - KiwiNige
http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3810466

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sunkencity
My experience is that developers who think they are gods gift to programming
have too little self-doubt / introspection to:

1\. produce code usable for others 2\. solve problems in a simple and
sustainable way - since they are so great, anything they do must be good...
solutions tend to be cryptic

~~~
MoeDrippins
Amen to that. The best programmers I've ever been around both get the problems
solved, and leave a legacy that can be followed, adapted, and replicated.

Could be that it's my context, (which is dull and businessy), but 99% of the
programming I'm around is NOT flashy or "revolutionary", but rather providing
a solution for a customer.

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herval
"The same developer who wasn’t quite the team player is now the one who
management elevates to the head of the pack."

actually what I see the most in EVERY company I ever worked on is quite the
contrary: the incompetent are the first to be promoted to heads of the pack...

~~~
bingaman
If you can't code, maybe you can manage. I've seen this happen in larger
organizations as well.

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extension
There is no absolute standard for "readable" code. I have served in positions
where recursion, lambda expressions and short circuit evaluation were
considered clever hacks requiring documentation and got me branded as a
troublemaker.

Ideally, readability standards would be made an explicit part of team/project
policy but it's difficult to define that standard without taking things for
granted.

Being a smelly jerk is certainly also a problem, but an orthagonal one.

Stereotypes are more dangerous than quirky developers. Though they are often
found together, don't conflate aptitude with eccentricity or grooming.

------
mkuhn
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518250>

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danbmil99
Duh? They're both.

~~~
noonespecial
Like plutonium. Managed safely, they can generate results that are impossible
any other way. Managed poorly, on the other hand...

~~~
dazzawazza
... and either way they leave a mess that takes a generation to
contain/cleanup/hide.

