[deanmoriarty]

I have seen that a couple times, mostly in startups: a highly functioning brilliant jerk was doing a pretty good job leading teams, but they had no patience towards poor performers and that caused morale issues.

Eventually the person got managed out (not fired, just isolated from the teams) and upper management thought the team would just eventually thrive after some short loss of productivity, but that never happened: the poor performers were put in front of the customer who commissioned the project (role that was usually handled by the jerk, who was highly competent at that due to their technical brilliance and assertive personality even with the customer), and after a few round trips the customer smelled the incompetency and literally said “we’re going to quit this project, we feel like there’s no technical direction lately”. Massive loss for the company, in the 7 figures. It almost caused the company to fail due to that being the largest customer at that phase.

In those cases, the jerk did an amazing job at keeping a very productive technical communication with the customer, and keep the high performers on track towards what really needed to be done in those projects.

[drtillberg]

Part of the problem is an a--hole is surrounded by a zone of disaster and chaos of their own creation, which makes them all the more indispensable. A--holes do not groom successors, they burn competitors (which everyone else is).

[woodandsteel]

The author is not saying that firing assholes is all you need for a successful company. Obviously hiring good people is also essential.