> People who are good at the work but not very nice are the “brilliant asshole” archetype. I could write quite a bit about how our industry mostly gets this archetype wrong – spoiler alert: they mostly don’t exist – but that’s another article.
I would really like to see that article, because I've personally worked with a few brilliant jerks in my time. I'm still friends with most of them to this day. I guess I'm just good at working with them and ignoring their jerkiness, so I keep ending up working with them?
I'm not sure why the author says this but I've seen quite a few in my day.
These are usually people that are high in Openness, low in Agreeableness and with above-average Psychoticism. I have more than a few friends that fall into this category (they're very difficult to find!), and they're all brilliant at whatever they decide to do. But they're very likely to not take your well-meaning advice, likely to think that you must be missing some context, and after that would still like you to know what they think about [X]. There's definitely some that are neurodiverse, but there are others that are very neurotypically successful. You can entice both of these with weird theories and conjectures, and it's necessary to at least know where their worldview leads but knowing the "base" of their worldview.
People of this kind are really only interesting when one has the bandwidth for long, potentially uncomfortable discussions, and when one is about as smart as the other guy.
People much smarter that average usually don't have the narc-y vibe (although I'm sure there's tons of them in academia) and they usually fall under the "Nice" category. Many of these people get looked over because normal people have a very difficult time understanding what they're saying, and are hence liable to putting them in the "incompetent" category.
...as for the rest of your post the carricature that you're painting looks awfully close to ... ME. I'm quite surprised by this as I always had the perception that I was "nice" regardless if I was "competent" in my current endeavour or not.
True, I veritably thrive in the company of highly competent people with a very direct manner of speech (even as direct as to be bordering on rude/sarcasm). I've always phrased it like "I like geeks". Over the years such company has not been the typical company for me so I've worked in roles where others were less than competent too - also in roles where I was the incompetent person (typically in intro while learning).
Being exposed to multiple types of colleagues and work roles/environments throughout some decades has allowed me to "soften up" some and if I may say so myself I tend to get along very well with "the normies" these days.
I see it as, like, people have priorities. And for a lot of people what they do on the job is not a priority in any other respect than to raise the financial means for whatever they do outside of work.
So they will (deliberately or not) aim for a competence/productivity level somewhere above the level that leads to layoffs but not much more. If they're intelligent that is.
And, saying this I also have to state that it seems like competence/productivity and intelligence need not be correlated that much.
And yes, you sound like the kind of people I was describing, but you seem to be very conscentious and don't have executive dysfunction. Some of these people have (at times) crippling executive dysfunction owing to their extreme stubbornness, so if you were to ask two different people about them you'd get completely different opinions. Someone would say the guy was the dumbest idiot ever, a complete bore; the other would say that he was so very charming and full of wit. It's somewhat like a child's view of the world, giving up on keeping a mask, being direct and growig in a more organic fashion without looking for "anchors" for "self-growth".
not OP. But in my experience there's a big gray area between "Brilliant/Nice" and "Brilliant/Asshole" quadrant where people who are very direct, have less patience for incompetence, or hold their coworkers to high standards go.
IMO these are the best people because they intervene before a company or team veers too far off course.
>I guess I'm just good at working with them and ignoring their jerkiness, so I keep ending up working with them?
This is definitely a skill. You can have, what seems to be, a bunch of jerks working together but they all have thick-skin so being a jerk to one another doesn't really affect any of them. Effectively hiring for this team is an exercise in finding people who think like they do.
Good meshing of personalities can override the predictions of the incompetent/niceness matrix in the article.
I would really like to see that article, because I've personally worked with a few brilliant jerks in my time. I'm still friends with most of them to this day. I guess I'm just good at working with them and ignoring their jerkiness, so I keep ending up working with them?
I'm not sure why the author says this but I've seen quite a few in my day.