Jeff Moden (2/9/2014)
We don't want some arrogant jerk or some lame sot that won't be able to communicate without pissing everyone off. There's no reason at all why someone can't be both competent AND a good team member. As on the 8 Ball League I used to play on, there's a huge difference between a good shot and a good player and both can be experts at 8 Ball.
I can understand and agree with that sentiment so much. We have a senior level programmer that always comes off as an arrogant jerk. He was in charge of redeveloping a software package into more of a .Net program. There was a flaw that a simple fix to the deployment package would fix. (Put 127.0.0.1 in the default config file so it wouldn't auto scan for other servers.) He said that employees missing the that setup change when installing hundreds of them should be considered incompetent and should be retrained or fired. The failure to make the change could have caused a HIPAA violation that could be in the $#00K+ range. He couldn't grasp that his minor f***-up could have bankrupted the company. It took a senior level CxO type to get it through to him that he was wrong.
And that wasn't the first time for that type of attitude. Unfortunately he is still with the company.
The upside is that we were bought out and he is now back to the same level as the rest of the programmers on the new SW compared to the 5+ years ahead he had with the old software. That has taken him down several notches.
So a team player that fits in is valuable. His extra skills may be important, but not being able to learn from the more knowledgeable people with specific experience is a wast of time.
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Jim P.
A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.