I have worked in professional software engineering environments where people acted professionally, and plan to create one in my new company. The mentality that "nerds will be nerds" enables and perpetuates this counterproductive behavior.
Same here. But a new engineer I hired who looked great on paper and on his interviews is just obscene. He's not a great engineer to boot. Can't fire him because I need him for now. I don't think it's a self perpetuating stereotype. I think some people are wired that way, and engineers tend to skew there because of the way their brains work (obviously not every engineer).
So what? Is "smartness" an excuse for the unwillingless to learn productive (or at least non-destructive) social behaviour?
If anything, I'd argue it is exactly the reverse: From people describing themselves as "smart" I expect the ability to learn this even more.
They are definitely not too dumb to learn this: Internalizing some basic rules of social behaviour is not harder than learning a new programming language or familiarizing with a new framework. It's not because they are unable, but because they don't care and got away with it so far - by which I mean they didn't have to face the consequences of the damage they created in the past. That's why any reasonable manager (or community leader) needs to create an environment where they have to care early on, before anything significant happens.
