An interesting read, I've been in both situations one where the 'toxic rockstar' was managed out and one where the 'toxic rockstar' was tolerated because of their code output.
The critical bit though is toxicity. There are people like Jeff Dean at Google who are 10x more productive than anyone else but make everyone work harder, and there are people who are 10x more productive but they make everyone around them feel like crap. That makes them toxic.
So if your brilliant engineer spends their time telling younger or less brilliant engineers how they just threw out all their crappy (but functional) code and re-wrote so that they could tolerate reading it, it doesn't bring others along. If they 'sign up' for all of the work so it will "be done right" and then slow the whole project down because nobody can work on it, they aren't "adding value."
I think the author was going for people who had become toxic, not people who were still moving everyone forward.
> So if your brilliant engineer spends their time telling younger or less brilliant engineers how they just threw out all their crappy (but functional) code and re-wrote so that they could tolerate reading it, it doesn't bring others along. If they 'sign up' for all of the work so it will "be done right" and then slow the whole project down because nobody can work on it, they aren't "adding value."
The problem might be hiring the younger or less brilliant engineers, and also placing them in positions where they cause significant damage, as it's driving your brilliant engineers to be toxic.
That is certainly a possibility. Its kind of a sucky place to be where you have to choose between one bright engineer or a bunch of less bright engineers because they can't work together.
The critical bit though is toxicity. There are people like Jeff Dean at Google who are 10x more productive than anyone else but make everyone work harder, and there are people who are 10x more productive but they make everyone around them feel like crap. That makes them toxic.
So if your brilliant engineer spends their time telling younger or less brilliant engineers how they just threw out all their crappy (but functional) code and re-wrote so that they could tolerate reading it, it doesn't bring others along. If they 'sign up' for all of the work so it will "be done right" and then slow the whole project down because nobody can work on it, they aren't "adding value."
I think the author was going for people who had become toxic, not people who were still moving everyone forward.