Follow up: I have seen a mass exodus of a high performance team because of a single competent jerk that was allowed to wreck havoc.
I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver.
I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.
Worst case scenario that i've seen with 'incompetent nice' is when somehow a team was composed of only such people. Nothing they made worked, but because they were all nice it couldn't really be admitted that it was because of their incompetence, so other competent people were pulled in to help, but then under incompetent leadership, so they were rendered ineffective.
> but then under incompetent leadership, so they were rendered ineffective
This made me realise that I'm pretty tolerant of incompetence so long as it's junior to me (where I can help them improve). But make me work for somebody incompetent and I will call them out on it, escalate it to their manager if need be, and leave pretty quickly if the situation isn't remedied.
> I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.
bullshit. how many incidents are due to incompetence? how many alerts were just forgotten? how many customers churn because of low quality ux? how many additional incompetent employees were hired because your nice friend let them through? incompetence erodes culture, leads to bureaucracy and the slow death of a company.
> I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.
They tend to climb management chain and then you are left with leaders who can't understand anything, that is by far worse than what any competent jerk can accomplish.
Is it? What happens when you need feature XYZ, and the competent jerk puts down their foot and says the system can't support said feature because of the way he drove the team to design it? Then you're left with a dilemma where you either lose your talent or lose the feature.
This kind of thing was something I saw when I did contract work because said competent jerks knew they could get their way.
That can work short term if the team is still full of competent people, but wont work long term since the manager is in charge of hiring, firing and promoting people.
I've seen multiple competent people quit the team, citing overwork and team's inability to deliver results.
The reason that more than half of the team were "incompetent but nice". They'd take weeks to do what other team members would do in days, and would require a lot of support too. But they'd still take headcount spots, so the team could not hire more people without firing someone first, and everyone was so nice....
I left because of "incompetent nice" people as I was tired of the never-ending torrent of incompetent nonsense I had to deal with and I felt the end-product just wasn't very good or something I was proud of.
"Jerk" is really too rough of a classifier; someone who communicates a bit like a jerk but is fundamentally well-meaning is someone I can work with; if you have a daily working relationship you can learn to just read over the snark or whatever.
Someone who insists on their view being forced through and will bully, insult, or use other tactics to do so is something I have a lot more problems with, as are the "this is the one true correct way and if you don't see my brilliance then you are most likely mentally retarded and should visit a hospital for an examination" type of people.
I think there is a simpler explanation: nobody knows how to run a large organization.
Large organizations are effectively superintelligences, but extremely dysfunctional ones. As soon as someone figures out how to share information and coordinate work in a large group of people, we will get our technological singularity. Even without any AI.
>I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver.
This sounds like many American police departments.
I have also seen an entire smallish company nearly completely collapse into itself because being a competent jerk basically became normal operating procedure and you either adapted or were bullied out of the company. Eventually the only people left were bullies and none of them could work together well enough to deliver.
I have never seen an incompetent nice employee ever do anything so damaging.