> These people can knock orders of magnitude off development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect your product years in to the future.
These people can also introduce orders of magnitude into development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect the product in negative ways years into the future. I seem to have made a career out of cleaning up after these people, and I have no sympathy for them. An amazing research project or tech demo isn't an amazing sustainable project.
> I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.
When I've seen this, it's usually because the task can be done 90% in a straightforward way but 100% is impossible, and the person doing the task thinks that doing it 90% counts, possibly because they're unaware of how important the the remaining 10% is, and no amount of explanation will convince them they're seeing the problem wrong. Then they should be let go, not because they did the task, but because they're unable to understand requirements and wasting both the time of others and their own time.
... all that said, there's a very good place for this type of person: small businesses. That seems to be where the author of this article is, right now. He's got some weird ideas about how computers work, that are probably not right, but maybe they are right and he's a genius and we're all years behind him. He's built a product around those ideas. If he can sell the product, more power to him. If he can't, and the product is meeting 90% but not 100% of his customers' requirements, they just don't buy and go to a competitor. No awkward conversations about firing, no wasted time trying to get their existing hire to perform instead of hiring people who can do the job, etc. And the burden of getting him to learn how to understand requirements is entirely on him and not on anyone else.
These people can also introduce orders of magnitude into development cycles, and make subtle decisions that affect the product in negative ways years into the future. I seem to have made a career out of cleaning up after these people, and I have no sympathy for them. An amazing research project or tech demo isn't an amazing sustainable project.
> I was pushed out of Microsoft just for accomplishing a task that was supposed to be impossible "because a senior engineer said so." In other words, I did my job (I wasn't aware it was supposedly impossible) and then a management chain became incredibly uncomfortable and dumped me.
When I've seen this, it's usually because the task can be done 90% in a straightforward way but 100% is impossible, and the person doing the task thinks that doing it 90% counts, possibly because they're unaware of how important the the remaining 10% is, and no amount of explanation will convince them they're seeing the problem wrong. Then they should be let go, not because they did the task, but because they're unable to understand requirements and wasting both the time of others and their own time.
... all that said, there's a very good place for this type of person: small businesses. That seems to be where the author of this article is, right now. He's got some weird ideas about how computers work, that are probably not right, but maybe they are right and he's a genius and we're all years behind him. He's built a product around those ideas. If he can sell the product, more power to him. If he can't, and the product is meeting 90% but not 100% of his customers' requirements, they just don't buy and go to a competitor. No awkward conversations about firing, no wasted time trying to get their existing hire to perform instead of hiring people who can do the job, etc. And the burden of getting him to learn how to understand requirements is entirely on him and not on anyone else.