Quirky Engineers Gone the Way of the Dinosaur? 319
Milican writes "I think its time we ask our fellow Slashdotters, 'is there still room in a company for a quirky 'guru', or are projects so large now by necessity team-based development rules.' Read this article on Embedded.com and decide for yourself." I think this article didn't describe someone really 'quirky' though - it was someone who didn't really want to work.
Re:Never hire people without basic social graces. (Score:2, Informative)
You can NEVER tell everything from the interview, that's what probation periods are for.
it's called narcissistic personality disorder (Score:2, Informative)
OK maybe not a disorder -- it's a matter of degree -- but we all know the type, and many of us are them: hasta hasta hasta be the special one, the center of attention, has to be different, on top, front and center, the star.
If you've read Miller's "Drama of the Gifted Child" you understand this type of person. These people have tremendous unmet needs (no need to go into the psychogenesis here, read the book). If you as a manager can meet those needs, they will perform for you beyond expectations. Meeting those needs requires one simple thing: you have to help them feel good about themselves, valued, safe and secure, because they never learned how to do it for themselves when they were younger.
This simple thing isn't so simple, though, especially since many technology managers are themselves former geeks -- insecure, hypercompetitive types to whom the idea of building someone else's ego is the very last thing to occur to them. Not everyone can effectively manage the gifted and driven. Done right, however, the return on a manager's interpersonal investment can be significant.
Every team has room for a star, but to give the star slot to someone without the star abilities risks at least two bad things: having the rest of the team laugh them out of the office (bad outcome), and having other potential stars perform at less than their full ability (why is this person getting the glory when I'm better than him?).
So, as a hiring manager, you have to ask yourself a couple questions:
does this person have stellar abilities that make it worth the extra effort?
am i willing to provide the frequent ego-stroking required to keep them performing at a high level?
are the team and the organization willing to support me in providing this individual with the social identity of "the gifted one"?
There's more you can say, but I think this is the essence of it.
Re:Weird co-workers (Score:3, Informative)
One of my office mates was an interesting fellow. He had a real problem making eye contact with people, loud
noises, or physical contact. I wouldn't call him a guru, exactly, but competent I suppose. It's hard to call someone a guru when they largely remind you of a squirrel. For kicks, a coworker would sneak up behind him and scream AHHHH!! just to watch him go white and literally run out of the room.
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FYI, That sounds like a classic case of the hypersensitivity that goes along with mild asperger's syndrome. Lack of eye contact is a hallmark as well. At least this guy was able to hold a job...
Re:Cringely said it best... (Score:3, Informative)
For the non militarily inclined amoung us, REMF stands for Rear Echelon Mother Fucker, a breed of 'superior' officer known for generating stuipid orders that get the guys in the trenches killed.