[on_and_off]

I have been lucky enough to have encountered very few jerks.

We are in a field where cooperation is encouraged and leads to benefits for everybody as long as the team culture allows it.

I did have to work with one jerk in a team of 19 people. He was meh as an engineer. Not awful but not nearly as great as he thought he was, he only had experience for him.

He was the only person extremely protective of his turf (for exemple, he was the only admin on the jenkins server).

It mostly seem to come from poor character and insecurity.

In the end many people (including me) did just not really work with him most of the time and in such a large team it was not really an issue.

The bar for being a jerk brilliant enough for people to bear your insanity is extremely high IMO. There are many great engineers who are also great people, so little reason to settle for a jerk.