I’m sure this is the threat that the brilliant asshole types would want you to believe. But there’s no limit to the amount of talent that one single toxically anti-social team member can deter from joining an institution, or that they can chase out of one for that matter. Especially if they’re a senior team member.
There’s also essentially no limit to the amount of damage they can do in companies. Even if you put aside the potential impact on company culture, I’ve seen many engineers needlessly waste huge amounts of company resources pursuing solutions that they considered to be technically brilliant (and which may have been), but were completely misaligned with the company’s objectives. I’ve personally witnessed one (especially brilliant) Rust engineer drive a company completely out of business with this approach.
You’re profoundly correct, and I’m amazed by the amount of ignorance on display in this thread and in this article. The conflation of “weird nerd” with “person who thinks they are above what the perceive as politics”, or “smart asshole” or “antisocial genius” is really at odds with the usual case. Real “weird nerds” might have innocuous flaws like a tendency for extreme grandiloquence or terrible body language, but frequently the Weirdest Nerds I have interacted with are kind over and above any other quality. It’s not “weird” to hate workplace politics or think that you’re the smartest guy in the room - both of those are extremely common. Many organizations operate on these basic components, it’s kind of a sad default for business. The weirdest nerd of all is the one who can calmly explain something complex to a new hire or do the hard work of documenting and explaining their position rather than trying to belittle others. I’ve seen toxic employees do far more damage than I have seen geniuses who single-handedly save the day. The latter are largely a hallucination brought on by repeated exposure to myths like the 10x engineer.
In general I agree with all that. And genius is a wildly overused term. But that doesn’t mean there’s none. TFA is talking about a woman that won a Nobel Prize.
Not every organization is going to have any opportunity to snag one but if you are running MIT, Google, or Lawrence Livermore you probably need to consider how to handle that edge case.
