[Yossarrian22]

Even if you’re not doing performance reviews there’s still a need for directing people technically when the work exceeds what one person(even a 10xer(if such a thing really exists), and that’s where you need some minimum amount of EQ

[omoikane]

I think the contention is that playing political games, as quoted in the article, is beyond the minimum amount of EQ normally expected for a non-management role.

Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.

[pixl97]

I mean it really depends where the weird nerd is. I mean I can say I'm on the border of weird nerd myself, though I say I have enough EQ to get around. Never want to manage people, and have a "high enough" position for myself. The company I work for is in the middle of a new software project and just a few months in I layed out a document stating how and where the software was going to hit failure points that were going to cause outages/degradations of service. Nine months later those failures started occurring like dominoes. We had to stop on new deliveries and work on performance for months.

I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.