I was thinking the same thing. There are diminishing returns with most jerks if they are marginally better than the rest of the team, but if they are 10x better, maybe you just need a team of 1.
One of my favorite interview stories was when I was interviewing for a very low-level dev position at a major telecom. I was interviewing to become member #8 or so on this team.
It was for writing dial-up internet billing software, essentially grant/deny access and provide hours connected to the dial-in banks. Nothing all that crazy, a pretty solved problem honestly by that point.
I asked them what they were replacing and why. The team lead got super excited and talked about how they were hired on to replace a single guy who had wrote a ~1000 line Perl script that pretty much handled this whole data import job. This guy apparently made the cardinal sin of using moderately complex regex in his tooling, and that was a sign of how incompetent he was and how the tooling obviously needed to be replaced wholesale.
They did not get the irony of this situation whatsoever when I made the obvious statement of why it took an 8 man team over 12 months so far to replace a single dude with a 1000 line Perl script. Absolutely saw nothing wrong with the situation whatsoever.
Thankfully I ended up not taking that job and starting my own company instead :)
It was for writing dial-up internet billing software, essentially grant/deny access and provide hours connected to the dial-in banks. Nothing all that crazy, a pretty solved problem honestly by that point.
I asked them what they were replacing and why. The team lead got super excited and talked about how they were hired on to replace a single guy who had wrote a ~1000 line Perl script that pretty much handled this whole data import job. This guy apparently made the cardinal sin of using moderately complex regex in his tooling, and that was a sign of how incompetent he was and how the tooling obviously needed to be replaced wholesale.
They did not get the irony of this situation whatsoever when I made the obvious statement of why it took an 8 man team over 12 months so far to replace a single dude with a 1000 line Perl script. Absolutely saw nothing wrong with the situation whatsoever.
Thankfully I ended up not taking that job and starting my own company instead :)