[onion2k]

Very productive individuals that don’t work as a team

I refuse to have those people on my team. One person who's twice as productive as everyone else sounds great, but if that person's work doesn't fit well and makes everyone else's work harder it always been a net loss in my experience. I'd prefer my team works well together than have some "brilliant loner" join it.

[dbt00]

This can flow both ways. I've had great engineers on my team that people were scared to approach because most of those conversations resulted in the questioner discovering they were wrong about something or missing some knowledge. Ideally people who are afraid of that are coached up to be happy to learn instead.

That only works if the great engineer is also excited to learn and help. If they call people stupid or fail to listen to all the details because they prejudge the situation, then they're more of the "brilliant jerk" archetype -- but they often aren't as brilliant as they think they are.

[keithnz]

As long as they aren't toxic, if you can't get the best out of brilliant loners, then, you don't deserve them, or possibly don't really need them. My experience is if the team culture is good, then they can fit in and you can accommodate their working style

[rawoke083600]

Ja I've seen teams without them (10x, brilliant loner, call them what you want). The times the teams are without that sort of talent(just talking pure problem solving ability here)... was the times the teams, product and company was also just that. mediocre/not-inspiring/meh. And they weren't solving a hard problems !

If we were to take this to the extreme. Where do you slot in someone like Jeff Dean ? Are you going to sit there and make someone like Jeff Dean, play poker-scrum about how long the next "big research jump/product" will take ? Granted not everyone will have a Jeff Dean. But I would never wan't to work in place that is as boring as a place without someone like him.

Yea in my experience, scrum sucks for innovation !

[onion2k]

they weren't solving a hard problems

That's absolutely true. I work on web apps for startups - most of the problems are quite simple. Jeff Dean would be bored out of his mind by the problems I solve.

[mattmanser]

What's with all the ellipses? Really makes it hard to understand what you're saying.

Almost all of them should be replaced with simple commas or full stops.

[rawoke083600]

agreed... and fixed

[andi999]

Actually the brilliant loner should be the norm (to have one), not the exception. If you believe in the 20:80 rule, that 20% of the people to 80% of the work. This rule doesnt sound so bad but actually (lets take these numbers as strict and not as a probability distribution). It means your top perfomer are 16 times more productive than the lower performers. Lets say you have a team of 10 people doing 100 work units. So 2 do 80 work units which is 40 per person, and 8 do 20 units which is 2,5 units per person.

Of course you could say this principle does not apply to your team (good luck!)

[jevgeni]

I'd agree with that, but it doesn't require that productive people are "loners". Best programmers I know are brilliant in communicating with people, setting standards, and so forth. Even if they sometime crank out a library or two on their own over morning coffee.

What is way more toxic, are people who consider themselves brilliant loners, because they've just implemented a web server using only Python's list comprehensions. And that is surely evidence of their unbridled genius. You know, people who are decent enough programmers, but are so egocentric in their work, that it borders on being inconsiderate.

For example, I used to work in a team where we wrote a lot of Python. We were three and one guy out of us considered himself above PEP-8 (he was good on the SW subject matter and was tight with the manager, so that went on unchecked). For example, all indents were done with 2 spaces. Meaning when some of us had to fix or change his code we had to fight our editors/IDEs. We ended up autopeping his files by default and ignoring any complaints.

[onion2k]

In my experience having a brilliant loner on the team increases the amount of work the team needs to do by more than they contribute. Also, very often, what they contribute is clever solutions to problems that didn't need clever solutions. The few teams when I've had that sort of person on my team productivity has gone down, not up.

Regarding the point you make about 20% of the people doing 80% of the work, that's half true. I find that 20% of the people do 80% of the work, but for any given period of time it's not always the same 20% of the people. One iteration might have a couple of back-end devs doing most of the stories, and the next iteration will find those two doing less while 80% of the stories are done by a DBA and a UX researcher. I've never had a team where one person consistently does most of the work. If that was the case I would be concerned about the make up of the team - clearly I'd need more people who do the sort of work that person is doing and less of the other team members.

Obviously my experience is not universal, so your experience may be very different.

[brtkdotse]

This is my experience as well. Give me a few medicore, but friendly and well-adjusted developers and we'll deliver a decent CRUD app within a standard deviation of budget and time.

Give me a team of superstars and we'll deliver a half-finished framework for solving the general class of CRUD problems one could have, along with a bad implementation of a gherkin dialect.

[donw]

Agreed.

What happens when the genius leaves? Can other people extend or maintain their work? Is there a lasting benefit to the organization? Does their work enhance the capabilities of other contributors?

From my experience in working with "very productive individuals that don’t work as a team", the answer to these questions is "no".

The reality is that a large chunk of generating economic value stems from being able to get along with other people.

The richest blacksmith in the Old West wasn't the one that was the most brilliant artisan. They were the one that knew the value of a customer, how to cultivate a long-term relationship with one, and how to get more.

[matsemann]

Yup, I'm not fan of the 10x-programmer moniker. The true 10x-ers are those that multiply those around them by a small factor in some way. If you can help all the members of your team to be 10% more effective, that has a bigger impact than even working twice as fast.

Or find ways to reduce the workload. For instance by questioning if the feature really is worth making that complex.

[Osiris]

As a team lead, this is the approach I try to take. I spend most of my time tackling the problems that are blocking other team members from getting work done. It's not sexy but keeping 3 guys working is more valuable than me getting to work on feature work. Sometimes the things that are blockers are the more interesting challenges and sometimes it's just frustrating bugs, but either way it's satisfying to me when I see the team cranking through our assigned feature.

[metalliqaz]

It's a matter of management. Brilliant people can be very useful. Even team players may not work with all other team players. Gotta find the right fit.

[alexashka]

I hear you.

When Michael Jordan was an asshole to everybody, I hear they refused to have him on The Bulls and won multiple championships without him.

Remember how The Beatles decided it's not worth it and didn't make any music? What a great decision by them, nobody would remember them long after they're gone anyway.

When I look at giant corps with their HR departments and filtering out of anyone who isn't a 'team player' - I am inspired. When Microsoft announces another ground breaking product - I forget all about the mediocre music and art created by small groups of difficult people.

When I compare Steve Jobs and his lunatic behaviour to Tim Cook, I am reminded that getting along clearly leads to better outcomes.

It is corporate culture of getting along that inspires me. It is people who think like you.

[onion2k]

You're getting downvoted but I think you make a valid point. Brilliant loners can be really useful for a business. They're the visionaries. They're the ones who change industries.

But imagine having Steve Jobs on your team, and trying to get the best out of him within the constraints of a project. It'd be impossible. Brilliant people like the ones you've listed need to be the ones leading. That's why I don't want them on my team.

[bcrosby95]

Yeah, but now you're most likely leaving the field of software engineering and are going higher up the promotion ladder.

[mattmanser]

Beatles/music analogy rather backfires, no-one remembers Paul McCartney albums or Freddie Mercury solo projects.

I could spend years listing bands that have split up, the lead singer or guitarist tries to go solo, utterly fails, band goes for reunion tour 10 years later. It's a known band cliché.

A large software project is a lot of hard work of basically a bunch of people trying to write a story together. It's different to sport. One asshole pulling in a completely different direction is enough to drag everyone down.

[danjac]

Counterexamples: John Lennon, Sting, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Phil Collins, Lou Reed...

[mattmanser]

They're the exceptions to the rule, the converse happens far more often.

[danjac]

...George Michael, Paul Simon, Iggy Pop, Cher, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Diana Ross...

[ponker]

I've seen my FAANG division manager use brilliant loners quite effectively by requiring them to be remote. They don't join meetings or really check in with anyone but every six months they pop up and say "I re-architected System X and now it can handle 10,000x as much traffic" or something like that.

[secondcoming]

That sounds like a nightmare. How did they handle things like being on call? Was the loner responsible for their genius 24/7?

[ponker]

No, basically the group managers assigned the “architecture astronaut” tasks to these brilliant loners. They would figure out the answer and then be assigned to a team to onboard them basically, they’d come into the office for a week or two to do design reviews, go back to being remote to get the stuff into production, and then the full crew would own the service and the loner would go to the next thing.

[secondcoming]

Interesting. How did the team feel about being maintenance people? I think I'd have found it a bit demoralising if someone gets parachuted in to work on the - I assuming - interesting stuff.

[ponker]

The team didn't become maintenance people. Basically the architecture astronaut did the first 6 months of 2-3 year projects. And everyone knew that they were geniuses, maybe there was a little grumbling but people got on board.

[tehlike]

Brilliant loner can bring up 20x the improvement though. Especially in the creative business, productivity could mean very different things.

[apabepa]

Yes I agree for the general case and I have seen this problem many times where management refuse to see the problem with anti-social loners holding too much of the competence in a team.

It can also depends on what kind of software you are working on. Some parts might require a 'brilliant mind' to push through a spike solution for certain areas. This individual should not really be in a "normal-happy-scrum-team" though, that would be a punishment both for the team and the individual...

[kevsim]

I tend to agree, though as an engineering manager, the brilliant loner poses an interesting challenge. Can you actually work to turn that person into a team player, see the value of collaboration and transparency, etc. Sometimes there's some insecurity or simply lack of understand behind their behaviors, and a behavioral shift is actually possible.

That being said, I've tried this a number of times and most of the time it doesn't work out.

[xtracto]

I have had someone in my team with some autism (diagnosed). The dev comes up as a VERY shy person who would barely talk during standups. Still a great developer and I love her to be part of my team. Even if interaction is different.