Are Cocky Developers Worth It?

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3771746/Are+Cocky+Developers+Worth+It?.htm

by edw519 • 18 years ago

19 32 18 years ago

itmanagement.earthweb.com

iamdave2• 18 years ago

Great article, lots of good points for personnel management.

jamongkad2• 18 years ago

You're kidding right?

iamdave2• 18 years ago

No, I'm not. I'm just appreciating this article from a completely different looking glass.

jacktasia• 18 years ago

Interesting to read.

...but it seemed to me that all the manager really did was actually tell the cocky coder to not be a d-bag and he listened...aren't people supposed to listen to their boss? / Why didn't he just do this in the first place when he first noticed the attitude?

bestes2• 18 years ago

...aren't people supposed to listen to their boss?

You're kidding, right? Being a manager of really smart people that can easily move jobs is not easy.

kcy• 18 years ago

I agree, this is a really difficult balance. In the real world I think Tyler would have said "Ok, I'll try and be nicer to those other folks" during the one-on-one meeting then returned to his original behavior w/in a matter of days or weeks.

So, do you compromise the technical strength of the team by firing Tyler or do you compromise team unity by keeping him?

My thought is that this is not a simple one way or the other answer. The post took the middle ground of talking with Tyler, which I don't think would really work out the way he wrote most of the time. Is there something else he could have said?

If you've had several conversations and this behavior is just the way it's going to be then what are the boundary conditions around when it's best to keep Tyler around vs firing him?

menloparkbum• 18 years ago

I can't stand articles like this. Not because they don't impart any wisdom, but because they sound so phony and contrived. If you are going to write fiction, at least get your archetypes right. Guys writing memory management code on windows are 50 year olds with giant beards, not cocky youngsters who use the phrase "mad skillz." The mad skillz guys are the ruby programmers who believe the apex of programming is building a "domain specific language."

thaumaturgy5• 18 years ago

Me:

Cocky Youngster

Wrote a memory manager in C++ for Windows

No beard

Don't think I've ever used the phrase "mad skillz" to describe myself

Never played with Ruby

---

Well, you got one point right anyway. :-)

andreyf2• 18 years ago

You: need to work on reading comprehension.

He said he was describing an archetype, and made no claim as to whether you fit it or not.

snprbob86• 18 years ago

Yes, this article is contrived and the archetypes are a bit skewed, but it closes on an interesting point.

I, myself, am a cocky developer. Additionally, my technical brain is better connected to my mouth and works far faster than my social brain. Often, my comments are misconstrued as attacks and it has significantly weakened my ability to impact decision makers.

I am however, well aware that I have problems. I aggressively seek out feedback and encourage those who provide it to "give it to my straight". Via this process, I have significantly improved my communication skills and developed some political tact.

This brings my to my next point: cocky people like to be right, but are well aware when they are wrong. If they are making statements which appear to be ad hominem attacks, they probably aren't doing it intentionally, or they don't mean any harm. So just mirror their behavior, be honest, be direct, tell them that their personality is hurting team moral, and suggest they try to improve themselves. Then, agree upon personal commitments of GROWTH AND IMPROVEMENT not instantaneous performance, which dictate their performance rewards.

Hell, I had one manager who requested to review all emails I sent to customers. My communication skills are many fold better for it.

Follow that plan, and I guarantee you can turn most any cocky coder into a productive team member. If you're lucky, that team member will even significantly educate the rest of the team and encourage them to do the same.

This is what people managers are supposed to do...

bsaunder• 18 years ago

I've also found the following strategies helpful:

Be less vocal. You might be right in your opinion on some matter, but, you don't always need to express it. Some things are okay to be ... less than ideal. Let people make their own mistakes (just try to contain them to less important system areas). Teach rather than debate.

When you do have a strong opinion, try to phrase your comments as less oppressive suggestions. If over time people ignore your suggestions and it's a critical system component, only then become more assertive and vocal. People hate being told what to do. But if you plant a seed, they are much more open to modifying their view in the long run, after they have digested your reasoning.

Everyone likes to do things their own way. As long a business goals are being efficiently achieved, don't mess with things. It seems better to guide people than direct them.

jwilliams• 18 years ago

Well, from the point of view that generally people really want to work with people they like and respect... no.

It's bad enough in small teams, but in large teams people like this can be really destructive.

cookiecaper2• 18 years ago

I worked at a place where the lead developer had this problem. All of the other programmers were new, and he'd been there over a year, so I think we were all willing to learn and listen ... but he did not accept any feedback at all and was determined to dictate, not cooperate. There's a difference between engineers and monkeys, and the lead clearly wanted monkeys; little coding robots who didn't question his strategies or methods, didn't make suggestions, and just obediently churned out what they were told without providing any input into design or architecture. To boot, he was absolutely unforgiving if your style didn't match his (for instance, I usually put the first property of a CSS rule on the same line as the opening bracket, and he doesn't ... and he told the owner that I was incompetent for this and similar infractions), but there were no formal style guidelines; you had to look at his code and try your best to format it exactly, or suffer embarassment and wrath.

The whole thing was rather demoralizing and I left in the first month, after quickly learning not to contribute if I was intent on keeping my job for even that long. The other skilled developers left shortly thereafter. He now works mostly with designers-turned-developers and purposely hires less-competent developers so that he doesn't have to field criticism.

It's a little disappointing still, because there's a whole group of people who believe that myself and a group of talented ex-colleagues are incompetent because of this person's [intentional and petty] mischaracterizations and immaturity, but I'm trying to be over it.

I guess that's only tangentially apropos, but cocky developers are no fun, especially when they're in powerful positions.

MrRage• 18 years ago

Your old boss is not really cocky, just a fascist control freak.

thaumaturgy5• 18 years ago

Whereas I come at this from the opposite perspective.

If you're absolutely certain you're correct, it's natural to want to limit the amount of discussion, feedback, and argument you have to deal with. You've already made up your mind, and that's that, and it's unlikely that a convincing enough argument exists that would cause you to change your mind.

The catch is, you have to be really, really good at what you do in order to adopt this stance, otherwise it's just sheer overbearing arrogance.

That's where the conflict comes in. Most people, frankly, aren't that stellar at what they do. A lot of folks kinda muddle along, and often change their opinions about accepted practices whenever they read something that takes precedence over their experience. If you doubt this, I think you need only to read some of the security-related threads here on News.YC, or just about any thread on OpenBSD-misc that incurs the wrath of one of the developers.

Furthermore, if he was the team lead, and he established a particular syntactic convention -- for whatever reason -- and you didn't follow it, then -- and I say this as gently as I can -- you weren't doing your job. That doesn't mean you were incompetent, and I'm not looking to insult you. But, basically, you weren't following his rules, and he was within his authority to establish those rules. It sucks that his rules weren't written out, but on the other hand, it's really not all that hard to look at some code and then format yours similarly. (Especially with CSS.)

Then apparently the lead developer started hiring what you call monkeys. I call them trainable.

See, my grandfather had a similar problem. He was one of the best RF and cable TV distributions systems guys in the Bay Area up until he died a few years back. He was an idiotic businessman, but when he was dealing with the technology, he simply was one of the best. (I could bore you to tears with stories.)

He absolutely refused ever to hire anybody else with cable TV experience. He hated dealing with them, because they'd been taught all of these bad habits that he would first have to un-teach before he could even begin to get them to do things his way -- the right way. Instead, he hired people with no experience at all, and they naturally just followed his lead, along with a little coaching.

It isn't quite possible to do just that in software development, because I think software development requires an entirely different kind of thought process from just about anything else. But, I can see the appeal to hiring inexperienced developers, and making them do it your way right from the beginning.

MaysonL• 18 years ago

Quick summary: technical skills != people skills.

(But: people skills are learnable, sometimes).

silentbicycle• 18 years ago

Also, someone with really bad people skills can undermine the entire team's technical skills.

bnolan• 18 years ago

Fuck that. My friends are the smartest coders I know, and the best people to go drinking with, meeting people, mountain biking - basically the coolest people in the world.

qwph• 18 years ago

It must be great being you.

dazzawazza• 18 years ago

IMO they are not worth it. The cost of tolerating the cocky developer is the productivity of the surrounding team.

In reality very few developers exhibit these borderline autistic traits that seem to result in complete lack of social skills and they are NEVER worth working with.

When the team suffers the product suffers.

MJConway• 18 years ago

Nobody is so good as to make up for the destruction of team cohesiveness and morale. Seriously. Nobody. No, not even you.

Everyone is allowed a gaffe or two. Everyone needs to get slightly thicker skins. Life is a contact sport.

That said, if you're a jerk on my team and you are unwilling or unable to change your jerkish ways after my best attempts at coaching, I will eject you from the team.

Simple.

andreyf2• 18 years ago

Are cocky developers worth it? Depends how cocky and how good they are.

sofal2• 18 years ago

The cocky guy in the story sounds like one of those extreme "we should code it all in assembly" types. I'm not usually very impressed with the pragmatism (and therefore the technical decisions) of people like that. Of course I don't know the context here.

rglovejoy• 18 years ago

No they are most definitely not worth the hassle. Most of the cocky types I have worked with had a lot of attitude but very little ability or talent. They were very good at office politics, though.

pavelludiq• 18 years ago

Im petty sure House MD was a show about a cocky programmer, but nobody could get the jokes, so they changed it to a medical drama.

Are Cocky Developers Worth It?

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