Atlassian Changes Annual Performance Reviews To Stop Rewarding 'Brilliant Jerks' (businessinsider.com.au) 432
Australia-based Atlassian"has implemented a new performance review strategy designed to give their workers a better evaluation of how they're performing," reports Business Insider, adding that Atlassian's global head of talent said the company wants to measure contributions to a larger team effort. "We want people to get rewarded for what they delivered."
In 2018 it soft-launched a strategy where most of its performance review process will have nothing to do with the skills in an employee's job, but more to do with how well they are living with the company values. Now, the strategy is being rolled out permanently and will be tied to employee bonuses... "We want to be able to evaluate a whole person and encourage them to bring their full self to work and not just focus on skills itself, but really focus on the way they do their work," said Bek Chee, Atlassian's global head of talent. She added that while workforces have changed over the past 30 years, performance reviews, for the most part, have stayed the same...
With this performance review system, Atlassian aims to throw out the idea of the "brilliant jerk", which Chee describes as someone who is technically-talented, but perhaps at the expense of others. Instead it is focusing on how an employee demonstrates the company values, how they complete their roles and how they contribute to their team. "We really want to enforce the way that values get lived, the way that people impact the team and the way that they also contribute within their role.
With this performance review system, Atlassian aims to throw out the idea of the "brilliant jerk", which Chee describes as someone who is technically-talented, but perhaps at the expense of others. Instead it is focusing on how an employee demonstrates the company values, how they complete their roles and how they contribute to their team. "We really want to enforce the way that values get lived, the way that people impact the team and the way that they also contribute within their role.
What a great way... (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you can't work well with others, we don't want you. Google has the same internal policy -- it's called, informally, "the assholes have left the building". It doesn't matter if you can write a single line bash script to replace Gmail. If your attitude brings the company down, you leave. End of. No bullshit ASD diagnosis gets you out of having basic etiquette for others.
Re:What a great way... (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't need competency just the ability to kiss ass strategically really well.
You have just stated Atlassian's entire business strategy.
A matter of preference (Score:2)
Unfortunately, I seem to be a minority opinion in this society.
Re:What a great way... (Score:5, Funny)
It's weird, then, that there are so many assholes that work at google.
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Wish I had mod points. Nobody says you have to be popular.
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Asked if it would be possible for someone who did well in their role to be outscored by someone who did poorly but was more likeable, she said, “Not really, because in order to get the highest level rating you have to meet the highest bar on all three factors. Those people would get the same rating.”
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Re:What a great way... (Score:4, Informative)
How about in Perl? :-)
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"The Company" is a moneymaking machine.
It is not the set of employees.
If the "asshole" helps the company make more money, it makes more sense to keep them.
If the "asshole" helps the company make more money than the people they tick off, then it makes more sense to let the people they tick off go.
Ultimately, work is just the sale of labour. Everything else is secondary to that.
Re:What a great way... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can't work well with others, we don't want you.
That's a failure of management. A good management helps people with different personalities get along. Otherwise, what are they doing with their time? Sitting in bug triage meetings? You can do bug triage meetings and help people get along.
It doesn't matter if you can write a single line bash script to replace Gmail. If your attitude brings the company down,
It isn't the guy writing amazing code who is bringing down the company.
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Fuck the idiots who claim to be 15 year senior programmers who don't have a clue what LSP, Single Responsibility or even Dependency Injection are!
I'll abuse those cucks until they leave.
Re:What a great way... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know a company is dysfunctional when they have a public press release about a new performance review strategy.
Perhaps they should implement it and see if it works before preaching to the world.
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It's a recruitment ad. Fed up of jerks being rewarded at your company? We don't do that!
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Sure they do, they're going to do it even more now than before. Actual productivity requires getting actual work done with other people, and sometimes that means discomfort. What they're going to reward now is the most manipulative backstabbing sociopaths.
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Fed up of jerks being rewarded at your company?
No. As a socially inept Aspie, I am one of the "jerks". But we get the work done while others are socializing and playing office politics, and at meetings we cut through the sugarcoating and get to the facts. Companies that weed us out may be nicer places to work, but also more likely to fail.
Re:What a great way... (Score:5, Insightful)
For many companies I would agree, but this is Atlassian.
Their business consists of mediocre software that is minimally capable of doing basic stuff, wrapped up in a cult of executives and consultants that believe regularly writing checks to Atlassian is a requirement of being "Agile" and that "Agile" is a synonym of fixing people problems with processes (exact opposite of original intent of Agile, but that's reality). They don't have particularly good technical capabilities nor would such ambitions really change their bottom line.
A key "evil" in commercial software development is getting stuck with an irreplacable guy. Sometimes that guy is a jerk, but sometimes they aren't. Either way, it rubs the company the wrong way that they actually have to care about retention because of this guy. There is a tendency to at least believe the person is a jerk because that justifies their frustration regardless of fact.
So Atlassian furthers their image as a company that is so good at processes, they are comfortable ditching the concept of the irreplaceable employee. So keep writing them checks and eventually your company too will feel free to lose or get rid of employees at will and Atlassian driven processes will save you. All while wrapping it up with the more sympathetic "brilliant jerk" narrative.
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And Bamboo is so limited and every third party integration costs $300 and you still can't do shit with it.
I couldn't evne set up a decent CI system with it, so I got them all over to GitLab and it's been awesome since.
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TFA defines the brilliant jerk as someone who puts their own success first and walks over others to improve their own standing. The tolerance for neurological diversity only extends to the point where it's not actually sabotaging other workers.
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Atlassian is an Australian company. We don't take people to court for a yes or a no down under.
In large part because we can't determine if it's yes or no when it's turned right-side up. It's super confusing!
Good luck with that (Score:5, Funny)
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The bigger the jerk the more brilliant he's gotta be.
But usually not brilliant enough to be worth putting up with. If he's so damn good let him become a consultant and see how well he does.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd prefer to work with someone who is brilliant and also not a jerk.
Let the brilliant jerks start their own firms where they can pay people what it takes to put up with their crap, or do freelance work where they only interact with a PM.
If I want someone for the long term, jerk-dom is a deal-breaker. A jerk, no matter how brilliant, brings everyone else down. In contrast, someone who is brilliant and not a jerk can elevate and encourage the merely bright or even just adequate people around them to perform at a higher level.
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>I'd prefer to work with someone who is brilliant and also not a jerk.
You don't say, Einstein! That never crossed my mind. /s
Except it did. Of course, everyone wants a brilliant benevolent teddy bear/mentor to work with. The reason brilliant jerks are tolerated is not because they are jerks. It's because they are brilliant. And sometimes, they can be invaluable to a particular project because of said brilliance. It may bring everyone else down, but it is a matter of whether their brilliance compensates
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Insightful)
Jerks are already filtered out by the system. Managers don't want to deal with them, co-workers don't want to work with them, HR considers them a headache because of all the complaints they generate. They're fired at the earliest opportunity.
Consequently, the jerks who survive aren't just brilliant, they're incredibly brilliant. So much so that, contrary to your claim that they bring everyone else down no matter their brilliance, their technical brilliance brings everyone else up more than their social offensiveness bringing them down. That is, they stick around because their net contribution to the company is positive.
They only way to filter them out more is for society to become less tolerant of their behavior. That increases how much their social offensiveness brings people down, resulting in their net contribution becoming negative. Trying to exclude them from your company at the hiring level will simply result in them being hired by other companies, who then eat your company for lunch thanks to their contribution. Your company (and your anti-jerk principles) then disappear in bankruptcy, while the jerks survive.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
The truth of the matter is: Productivity matters more than your feelings of comfort.
If I hire a lawyer who is a complete asshole, but NEVER LOSES. I'm hiring that fucking lawyer without the slightest apprehension. I will put up with him talking down to me as i laugh all the way to the NOT jail.
Nobody (READ IT: NOBODY) is arguing that assholes need to be rewarded for being assholes. The difference is, when someone is downright MAKING the company (say John Carmack at iD software), people care more about his incredible contributions than whether or not they like him.
If you go to work to LIKE your co-workers, you have a fucking luxury the majority of the world doesn't. The rest of us are trying to pay bills and put up idiots. If we could exchange idiots for "equally asshole, but brilliant hard workers" we'd up-trade for that any day of the week.
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If I hire a lawyer who is a complete asshole, but NEVER LOSES.
No such thing. Understanding people is a requirement for being an effective lawyer. If your lawyer is being a complete asshole, that means they either don't understand people, or they have a chip on their shoulder, either of which will impede their work.
The same thing applies to technical work: You're building systems for people to use. If you do that without caring for people, then you're going to do it badly.
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Jerks are already filtered out by the system. Managers don't want to deal with them, co-workers don't want to work with them, HR considers them a headache because of all the complaints they generate. They're fired at the earliest opportunity. Consequently, the jerks who survive aren't just brilliant, they're incredibly brilliant. So much so that, contrary to your claim that they bring everyone else down no matter their brilliance, their technical brilliance brings everyone else up more than their social offensiveness bringing them down. That is, they stick around because their net contribution to the company is positive. They only way to filter them out more is for society to become less tolerant of their behavior. That increases how much their social offensiveness brings people down, resulting in their net contribution becoming negative. Trying to exclude them from your company at the hiring level will simply result in them being hired by other companies, who then eat your company for lunch thanks to their contribution. Your company (and your anti-jerk principles) then disappear in bankruptcy, while the jerks survive.
Does repeating this to yourself help you sleep better at night? In my experience the jerks are brilliant at manipulating the system and doing everything they can to look like they're more productive than they usually are.
I've worked with some pretty big jerks in my time and some have actually been brilliant. But in all of my years the most brilliant people have actually been quite kind and always willing to take a moment to teach or to help their team out. I'm actually working with the biggest group of br
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I'd say that is more along the scope issue (salesman making a sale no matter what and ignoring how little the company enabled the developer to do, combined with incompetence of your management. I wager that a developer did not directly escalate you, but some more contract oriented person at the vendor.
It's a crappy situation but I don't think it's an example of a jerk developer getting their way with a feature request they didn't like through being a jerk and directly escalating you without involving less
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
I work with actually brilliant jerks. But the jerkiness judgement seems to come from the technically incompetent who the 'jerks' don't like putting up with. When it comes to solving hard problems, there is nothing better that a few brilliant jerks who respect each other for their technical competence.
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I work with actually brilliant jerks.
I work with people who believe they're brilliant jerks. Well, they're bang on 1 out of 2.
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Is there some link between being brilliant and being a jerk? Can you be the former without being the latter?
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a hard thing for any of us to admit that someone else is way smarter than us in our own field of expertise. But failure to acknowledge one's own limitations brings out the jerk in other people whose superiority we ought to be acknowledging. Sometimes I've been an outsider of a group and watched the group dynamics and thought, "X acts like a jerk, but it's because Y keeps insisting Y knows how to do things and keeps screwing up." I don't know if there's anything to be done about that.
Yielding doesn't mean just giving up. But it does mean cheerfully acting on faith and trying to learn what you thought you already knew. I try to keep it in mind, because there are some areas where I'm that expert talking to a room of people who wish they had decades of experience in the field like I do. I try to yield when I'm not the lead brain in hopes that others will reciprocate when I am. It's hard.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
"Brilliant jerk" tends to be more jerk and less genuinely brilliant.
The brilliant people that I've worked with have a few characteristics in common:
I have worked with assholes that think they are brilliant and talk constantly about their qualifications but collapse into bullshit when faced with real technical challenges. Those dipshits bring everyone down, and the effect is exacerbated by lazy management unwilling to figure out who is the competent one and who is the bullshit artist. I am optimistic that Atlassian is at least aiming for competent management, rather than soft-hearted "process" or coddling those who are unwilling to step up to get the work done without demoralizing those who really are competent.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, and the one big important thing: they know that their knowledge has value and so they pass it on.
Every brilliant person I worked with that I would actually call brilliant also had a strong ethic to make the work of others around them better. Everyone will put up with someone who is a bit abrasive but honestly works well with others, knowing that no one person can make the whole product.
So-called Brilliant Jerks tend to have a high hit-by-a-bus factor, because they are so convinced they are the only person that can get the job done. Even great work can be useless if nobody else knows how it works and the jerk leaves.
If these jerks are really so good, they can make apps on their own and do fine.
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The highlighted items above are why those people are considered or referred to as jerks by their peers and, on occasion, their. bosses.
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I’ve worked with “brilliant jerks” before. The ones I’ve known tended to get in the way of other people trying to get their own work done. I wonder if that’s sometimes an intentional part of their strategy - trying to look even better by actively interfering with those immediately around them.
Bek Chee (Score:5, Insightful)
Quote from the original article regurgitated by linked article: “We recognise things are not the way they used to be, yet companies haven’t evolved (from) 30 years ago when they were primarily made up often of white men."
Can someone explain what any of this has to do with "white men"? I get that it's trendy with the Twitter crowd to shit on white men. I also get that Bek is not a man. But overt racism and sexism like this is just ugly, even if it's not against a minority. What happened to valuing people for their contributions rather than discriminating on the traits they didn't choose and can't change?
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The phrase "white men" does not appear in either article, neither the Business Insider one or the Atlassian blog post.
Where did you read it? You can post the URL?
Re:Bek Chee (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/atlassian-ditches-brilliant-jerks-in-performance-review-overhaul/news-story/82a5e2abba1939f51d68ae81db8f05bd
My guess is they removed the controversial parts after someone pointed out how racist and sexist they are. The current Atlassian post still has some parts in the same vein, e.g. the "This can be especially true for underrepresented minorities or women" paragraph.
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It seems Business Insider concur, as their article currently has no mention of white men.
Which is good, as the race and gender of employees is entirely irrelevant to whether they're brilliant and/or whether they're jerks.
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> Which is good, as the race and gender of employees is entirely irrelevant to whether they're brilliant and/or whether they're jerks.
History, modern psychological testing, and surveys disagree with this claim. The correlation of birth gender with abuse, achievement, and intellect are strong, though they are certainly not the only factor, and correlation is not the same as causation.
Do you need pointers? Wikipedia has a number of articles, many with excellent references.
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Thanks to the AC for providing a link to the article you are talking about:
https://www.news.com.au/financ... [news.com.au]
In context the quote doesn't seem to be racist, it's just stating a fact that the demographics have changed a bit over the decades, and citing that as a reason to come up with a new rating system that is more suited to the current situation.
This could be an interesting debate, but you played the race card so...
Re:Where it fits in (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but white men are the most tolerant on the planet. White men ended slavery. White men invented the same treatises of compassion and equality that are being used to vilify them now. Can you name a culture more tolerant? Chinese/Asian? Muslim? Indian? No they're all sitting back laughing at the self-destruction that all this "tolerance" has wrought on the West.
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Is this some form of navy seal copypasta I'm not familiar with, Anonymous Coward Marine?
Bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
The tech industry is in a bubble. They lose $200 million per quarter, but the stock is sky high and the company has a market cap of $34B. Completely delusional. Once the bubble pops, all of this nonsense gets thrown out and the firing starts.
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It did pop once when Dotbomb happened. The companies individually pop all the time. It's a dynamic process.
2008 was not a big deal. It did not topple any of developed countries governments (I mean like USA or France, not shitholes like Greece). Even "Great Depression" did not topple American government.
Crisis is when 1917 happens, not when 2007 happens.
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I've seen 3 tech bubbles in my lifetime. And high PE ratios for these AI companies smells like a replay.
How tight? (Score:2)
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I love science.
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How do you calibrate it?
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How do you calibrate it?
I send it out to a lab for ISO/IEC 17025 Accredited, NIST Traceable calibration along with my Fluke multimeter. Easy peasy.
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A big mistake. (Score:2, Interesting)
This what happen when organizations value process over talent. Both Brilliant Jerks and Awesome Team Player have a role to play in an healthy organization. One is a disruptor and creates new ideas and one promotes stability.
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Most are now learning that the risk of a brilliant jerk turning the company into a rape factory isn't worth it.
I can't wait! (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't wait until this bubbles through to surgeons and the people who design airplanes.
"Well, he may not have known how to sew up your artery again after your abdominal surgery, but he fits our company culture so very well. We're sorry you died on the operating table."
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I can't wait until this bubbles through to surgeons and the people who design airplanes.
You're right; Boeing should keep doing whatever it is they're doing.
Re: I can't wait! (Score:2)
That's an absurd idiotic analogy.
The reverse is just as likely (Score:2)
Seriously, this is a site of Nerds, yet we're fawning over alpha males. How many times in your life has one of the alphas been completely incompetent save for good looks and charisma? How many hours have the people on this forum put in doing the _real_ work while the good looking and personable types reap the rewards?
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Being a jerk does not mean you're a bully or hostile, it just means you don't fit in the company "culture" whatever that may mean. Bullies and hostilities are generally a product of trying to conform to the same company culture, how about you do your job, go home, don't bother anyone or try to shape them into your 'mold'; sure it may be a jerk move never to show up to the team bar crawl or point out that some people didn't do their job, but that's part of doing your job.
Trying to fit into a company culture
Re: I can't wait! (Score:3)
Because "jerk" is subjective, it means brilliant people will inevitably be labelled a "jerk" by someone not so brilliant. Many, many people do NOT like to be significantly dumber than someone they have to work with. They feel powerless to challenge the brilliant. Their Dunning Kruger situation becomes laid bare and it's too much to handle, so they lash out at the brilliant. Or their personal pride leads them to reject brilliant advice over and over until the brilliant snap at them. At some point, these ubiq
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Re:What is a brilliant jerk? (Score:5, Interesting)
How many of those "brilliant jerks" are really just jerks who have bullshitted management into thinking that they are brilliant?
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People that are brilliant are generally considered jerks because they don't/can't conform to company culture and they get promoted or get out quickly. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, people do better than you, they're jerks, they leave, they're jerks, if they join you in the interoffice SJW games, then they're your friends and fit in the company culture until you're dispensable.
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Annoying but true.
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In the 80/20 rule, it's someone from the 20% who makes the 80% feel bad no matter their behavior.
That is an oversimplification. What we are talking about is mental health and how much mental illness a person is carrying. I see the company ignores that issue and instead puts it onto the individual, regardless if their performance and commitment to what they are doing is consequence of their mental illness or not.
Cut the crap about toxic people
No way. Toxic people exist, they're as real as the personality disorders making them behave that way get. How much of 'a jerk' some are is an expression of their internal dialogue.
The
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I'd be a jerk too (Score:5, Insightful)
If I was a brilliant developer who was better at solving technical problems and writing functional code than my peers, and I worked it a place that failed to reward me despite the fact that I was carrying the less capable team members on my shoulders, I would be a jerk too.
Naw, I lie. I wouldn't be a jerk. I'd just quit, and go work for their competition, and eat my former employers lunch.
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What a load of hooey... (Score:2)
.
To me it sounds as if they just wanted a
Fix your 15+ year old feature requests (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently one of their company value is doing what's right by their customers, yet they have at least a dozen feature requests for their flagship product JIRA that have been open for at least 10 years they have not addressed.
Some of these things are *extremely* basic functionality that all bug trackers should have, and some of them have no real workarounds.
Off the top of my head here are the 3 that impact my company on a weekly or daily basis:
1. No ability to give system fields default value. You can use custom fields for this but this brings its own problems (one of several documented below).
2. No ability to delegate project creation permissions - only global admins can create new projects, there's no way to split off just that simple permission from everything else.
3. If you have a particular custom field that appears on 2 issue types, if both of those issue types appear in the same project, they must both have the same default values. Eg if you have an Issue Description field and you want to have a Technical Debt and a Bug issue type, then whatever default template you put in that field to fill out will have to be the same in those issue types. There is a non-intuitive clumsy workaround for this if you have Scriptrunner for JIRA plugin, which IIRC is an annual cost of $1400 for a 500 user instance.
Anyone considering JIRA for their company would be well advised to trial it first. Luckily my company can persevere, but for some there will be showstoppers.
I fired a brilliant jerk (Score:5, Interesting)
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I fired the most productive person in our company because she was a jerk. I'd do it again if I had to, too
That's a failure of management. You didn't know how to help your underlings get along. Next time you should get yourself the proper training. If they are actually brilliant, they can be mentored.
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I wish that were true.
It is true lol. There are courses about it [mkbconseil.ch], and books about it [amazon.com], and of course blog posts. I don't know which ones are good, but if you haven't made an effort at learning how to manage brilliant jerks, then you've failed in that aspect of leadership.
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"Jerk" is subjective, and someone who is inferior to someone else...
Anyone who starts their argument by assuming other people are inferior to them is objectively a jerk.
Would have made for boring "House" episodes ... (Score:2)
Atlassian aims to throw out the idea of the "brilliant jerk", which Chee describes as someone who is technically-talented, but perhaps at the expense of others. Instead it is focusing on how an employee demonstrates the company values, how they complete their roles and how they contribute to their team.
Yes, discount the jerk who knows what he/she's doing in favor of those that "fit in" and "toe the line" ...
(admitting that House was a HUGE, tedious asshole)
Ep1: Patient died. Ep2: Patient died. ... Ep177: Patient died.
Were they that broken before? (Score:2)
Sounds like a place to avoid (Score:2)
If you do work there, carrying a large capacity voice activated recorder everywhere would probably be wise. Recordings can save you from vague charges of conduct unbecoming of a corporate drone.
The biggest thing to avoid is being stuck on project teams with more than 1 or 2 people who can't do their job, this includes project managers...
Just sit back, keep your chin up. nose to the grindstone mouth closed and nod your head when appropriate. Never criticize or complain or look funny at someone when they sa
The big problem with brilliant jerks (Score:5, Insightful)
What company doesn't already do this? (Score:2)
I countered that my skills and integrity to the success of the company often put me in a position of advocating a minority opinion, or speaking inconvenient truths. Further, it was exactly these characteristics that the company valued, and I pointed at the list of achievements over th
Atlassian Changes Annual Performance Reviews To S (Score:3)
BOOM! POW! SLAM-DUNK!
What can I say . . .
FTA - Atlassian aims to throw out the idea of the "brilliant jerk", which Chee describes as someone who is technically-talented, but perhaps at the expense of others.
Holy Jumping Catfish - they just FIRED SLASHDOT ! ! !
Doesn't anybody remember the term... (Score:2)
It's called a superiority complex and very intelligent/competent people are sometimes afflicted with one. Einstein was, 'brilliant'; your
Should be non-news... (Score:3, Insightful)
To be honest, I probably fit more in the brilliant jerk category myself, I never really learned to work with people to get things done and I had little tolerance for technically inferior work; doubly so for those that claimed it was much better than it was.
The problem is that there needs to be balance. Somebody with technical excellence that at noticeably different level than other teammates can easily become a target for being a jerk.
I finally recognized this behavior recently when people would constantly ask me questions or bait me. Then again, for health reasons, I'm no longer working as a software engineer full time.
But that shows the real threat of jerks, brilliant or not. They rise by draining others. A high functioning average team beats a team with a genius vampire feeding on coworkers in long term. Then again, when has tech these days ever acknowledged the future in which they aren't the youngest, most energetic, most knowing.
I miss real engineering cultures and the companies that had them. Real mentorship, real learning. Technical conflicts were allowed, but disrespect was not. I remember really heavy discussions only to have a nice lunch with the same people the same day.
These days, you have junior and senior coders that mistake their arrogance for confidence. We talk of the bubble popping, but maybe it's best to just deal with toxic individuals without resorting to a massive economic contraction to sort it all out.
Smart person (Score:2)
vs a nice person who can try and understand the problem?
Hire on merit.
Shame as social control (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a great example of how shaming is justified by citing "apex behavior" as the reason for social control. The social control is that if you show signs of brilliance that demonstrates your capability to outperform others around you then you are, by inference, a jerk.
I see radical new ways of how socially manipulative people can put the burden of performance on people who can deliver by calling them out as a jerk if they don't co-operate. These type of policies show scope for serious unintended consequences, the first example being:
Our definition of “individual performance” is intentionally weighted to include amplifying the work of others.
or
This can be especially true for traditionally underrepresented groups who tend to volunteer for (and in some cases, are assigned) a greater percentage of work related to team building
My advice to techheads here is to go further with this than they expect you to. If you are a brilliant with kernel internals, stop that and organize a cake day and make sure it counts as part of your performance evaluation. Don't wrestle with regular expressions implemented in your visitor pattern, instead take time out to get in touch with your emotions on why "Demanding Bitches" aren't scrutinized and sometimes even celebrated. Point out how manipulative they are and see how far it gets you in your next performance review. I can assure you the personality disordered have already factored your dissatisfaction into their manipulation to paint you as the bad guy - it's what they do.
Technology used to be a "safe space" for male bonding with your peers yet even that has been shamed with the snide term "brogrammer". I see more and more feminists invading tech the same way they invaded the left and are using it to dole out social control to the men and women who refuse to conform. The women I met in this environment who were able to excel did so because they were excellent, not because they needed to bring the standards down low enough so they could participate. They earned their respect by performing in masculine space, not conforming it.
Here we clearly see the toxic-ally masculine feminist narrative playing out, demonstrating their power by associating negative emotional traits to aspirational masculine attributes such as brilliance and capability as being somehow jerk-like.
Sure, we all know that guy sometimes we are that guy however men have been bringing them down a peg or two all by themselves for a very long time without the requirement to emote using strategies that are clearly designed to introduce ambiguous metrics to provide scope for coercive manipulative tactics. That EQ is behavior and IQ is capability is ignored. IQ is a trait, EQ is learned and you had better learn gentlemen because otherwise you're just not a team player. As if teams don't have star players.
So what comes after this [whimn.com.au] you might ask?
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Re:Oh right friends at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much. Rather than being paid for performance, it's becoming a conformity and popularity pay system. Schmoozing and virtual signaling get you paid more. Coming in, working hard and producing might not. They're going to end up with a work force that all think and talk the same. Everyone's going to agree with everyone and no one will stand up and challenge decisions. In the end, they might all be buddies, but the product might suffer if no one is willing to create friction to say a decision is a horrible idea.
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This is really spot on to what I experience.
Re:Oh right friends at work (Score:5, Insightful)
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> Software is produced by people, but the critical problems are designed or fixed by very few. I've seen problems where many different teams spent man-years trying to figure out and the "brilliant jerk" so happens to get involved and fixes it in hours. What most people call "brilliant jerks" are really just intelligent people who have no time for politics or dancing around to not hurt someone's frail ego because their hardest isn't enough.
This really describes me!!
Re: Is Atlassian publicly traded? (Score:2)
You think performance evaluations of staff matter in the grand scheme of things m
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You sound like a brilliant jerk. Conform to the company culture or get fired.
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(In my 100-person department I only ever dealt with one person who behaved toxicly - and they managed to force him out eventually, under the "old" evaluation system.)
But was this person harming the department when you got rid of him? If the guy was not all that, yeah, he should go.
Brilliant people often have to be handled a little bit. . Like you talk to them... "Why did you call Suzy an unsufferable Bitch Carl?" So Carl Tells you "Because she is!" Then you tell Carl he's gotta tone it the hell down, because he's acting like an unsufferable bitch.
But the tete' a tete' goes a little different if Carl is 90 percent pain in the ass 10 percent worth the hassle.
It's