I figured the Hacker News crowd would hate this article but I thought it was well written and worth posting. I've been a bit of the Brilliant Jerk myself in jobs and I've also been a manager at places with a Brilliant Jerk problem. I've personally seen how the rest of a group can do much better if you remove someone causing problems. Sometimes you find the other non-jerks are brilliant too, they just need the room to shine.
The key takeaway for me from this article is that startup employee culture is as important as technical ability. It's a scaling challenge; if you need to go from 3 people to 20+ and one of those earliest people is poisoning the culture you have a real problem. Hopefully good management can address that problem without going so far as firing someone. But sometimes the solution is to get rid of a jerk, no matter how brilliant they are.
I'm asking you this question because you seem to support the article, what exactly do you think the author means by the term "brilliant jerk"? It seems like their description is of a very nice, respectful, talented person, but who maybe is open about their disagreements with decisions that are being made? Am I correct? I just don't understand how this person is a "Jerk". I value someone like this in a company, they are the ones who usually stop a bad decision from being made.
I've dealt with what I thought were brilliant jerks before, and they always made people feel small and inadequate, and generally had an attitude of annoyance with "lesser mortals", if you will. This didn't change whether the company was 3 people or 100 people.
Is my analysis of that author's type of "Brilliant Jerk" correct? And if so, what are the problems that the "Brilliant Jerk" causes as the team grows.
I think the article uses the term "Brilliant Jerk" to describe someone who is technically brilliant but not politically apt or motivated by money ("brilliant businessmen"). That's not what I (and probably you) mean by the term. Managers that view allowing employees to work from home or giving them challenging technical work as "coddling" are the real jerks in my opinion (albeit not brilliant ones).
The article could be right if it spoke about genuine "brilliant jerks". Companies I've worked have passed on candidates who aced the technical interview but then proceeded to yell at at interviewers when there was a disagreement or make sexist remarks (duh on the latter point).
I am not saying it doesn't happen, I've yet to encounter any existing employees who were truly brilliant jerks: I've encountered brilliant engineers who had trouble related and showed impatience with average (that is average compared to other engineers within the company) engineers, but none were worth firing. They also had a particular eye for under-appreciated talent and would often spot and mentor employees with high potential, but who had underperformed (compared to their potential that is -- they may have still done well in a stack ranking, but they had the potential to contribute a lot more) whether due to lack of focus, lack of self discipline, or plain inexperience (almost always a lack of debugging skills).
I have also encountered employees who were jerks, were technically good (but never true outliers) but were political and were more interested in growing their power rather than technical excellence. They would be worth firing, but the problem is jerks follow a "kiss up, kick down" pattern: traditional ("micro-") managers love them and give them free reign to bully other employees (including the technically brilliant but less socially and politically apt individual contributors).
No solution is going to be perfect -- and I am not nearly experienced enough to speak from anything but gut feel -- but what seems to work (and have created engineerings organizations where I enjoy/have enjoyed working) is:
1) Filter out jerks, ladder climbers (those more motivated by status and money than by impact, learning, or solving hard problems) as a part of the hiring process (which includes -- but is not limited to -- the interview process).
2) Take extra-ordinary steps to reduce company politics. This is easier said than done: good[1] startups avoid that because everyone is aligned to the same goal, the trick is maintaining that kind of an alignment as the companies grows. I am currently reaping the fruits of such an atmosphere, but I am still learning and trying to understand how this is accomplished.
[1] There are just as many terrible startups as there are amazing ones -- and there is less of a thing such as "an average startup". Quality (in terms of "place to work") follows an inverted Bell Curve. I have heard (but fortunately haven't experienced firsthand) my share of horror stories of small startups that are far more political at 20 people than Google was at 20,000 people. Naturally, the earlier the stage, the greater the variance.
The key takeaway for me from this article is that startup employee culture is as important as technical ability. It's a scaling challenge; if you need to go from 3 people to 20+ and one of those earliest people is poisoning the culture you have a real problem. Hopefully good management can address that problem without going so far as firing someone. But sometimes the solution is to get rid of a jerk, no matter how brilliant they are.