[laichzeit0]

Well I had a “math expert” join my team recently and the problems were: they couldn’t work in a team, verbally expressed their intellectual superiority to everyone else, didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production, could not follow instructions from superiors, thought most of the work they were given was “boring” and invented their own projects to work on, etc. I don’t know if that type of attitude is acceptable in academia, but it won’t work in industry. So now I’m extremely cautious about on boarding anyone without a proven track record at working outside academia. I simply don’t have the time to “manage” someone like that, shit had to get done.

[laurent92]

> thought most of the work was boring

It’s my biggest problem, both with people who want trendy frameworks, and myself who was bored with work in my younger years (til I started drinking and made changes and created my company). “From a million dollars, anything is your passion” is quite true (was it Joel on Software?), but IT is quite boring when evolving at the lower levels.

I’ve loved the book “Tribal leadership” which defines levels of career,

1-Almost dropout;

2-Bored worker (apathetic victim, but delivers work - This was me);

3-Working like an as but executing on your own skills (“lone warrior” - This is me now);

4-Executes well with a mentor above and mentoring below, which pushes the organization forward by “belonging” to the social fabric;

5-Executes for others - Creates relationship between people so they can execute together - that’s the “startup ecosystem” or corporate leader style, those people often look like gurus amazed by the smartness of people in their ecosystem, which, if they are contagious and humble, becomes true leadership.

[dzolob]

I believe these attitudes are somehow commonplace along academia, but I think it extrapolates to several disciplines, including software development or engineering.

There is a misunderstanding between where on the abstraction layer you are standing and how smart you are. The commonplace along mathematicians is that, as we are standing pretty low, we are the smartest of them all, and since there is basically no interaction with people in other layers, this belief gets comfortably reinforced.

Smarts comes in different flavors, and realizing that yours is just one of many and does not work at all in other contexts is hard. Treating others like morons and acting bored is a lousy way to deal with it.

[kybernetyk]

>didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production

This is the biggest problem with fresh graduates.