Eric Spiegel shoots down "cocky software developer"

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/3771746/Are+Cocky+...

Eric, the problem isn't that your boy is "cocky". The problem is that in a society where the genuinely aggressive and completely unprincipled advance far beyond you or Tyler, his quite natural pride is a problem in your subordinate, subaltern roles, and he will gradually be ground down, as will you, over the years into nothing much.

It is to me bizarre, Eric, that in a society with people like Sarah Palin (and the arrogant female manager who told me in 1979 that all possible compilers had been written), people like Tyler net out as problems. Palin is the genuinely arrogant person.

A decent society would provide Tyler and your team with physical and mental challenges, but corporate life is designed to do precisely the opposite.

His overweening "cockiness" is in fact an artifact of the low-level psychological and physical disorders of the other team members, which in the corporate environment (in my experience since the 1970s) include substance and food abuse and depression. They "resent" him, and he's in effect "slimed" by that resentment: it covers him and becomes his attribute and his problem as defined by you as his manager.

Ever since the 1950s, "cocky" software developers have sought to do what Tyler wants to do. You say Tyler wants to implement manual memory management in C++ and not rely on garbage collection.

This is because, IMO, Tyler feels he knows algorithms in books BETTER than often obfuscated code, and would find the straightforward implementation of the most modern algorithm available far easier, and far more pleasant, than shoe-horning workarounds to the limitations of C# memory management.

I do not know whether Tyler is right. Gerald Weinberg relates the story of the programmer who in the 1950s developed his "own" IOCS and this befouled the system as a whole.

However, the basic contradiction of the corporation as seen in Galbraith and in Drucker isn't a personality attribute or defect of Tyler.

This is that the corporation, while existing in a savage jungle (in which for example the American taxpayer is calmly expected to foot the bill for an AIG bailout when the American taxpayer is being laid off and doesn't have a pot to piss in), its employees are expected to be selfless "team members", like Chinese workers in the Cultural Revolution.

This didn't work in the Cultural Revolution even though millions of Chinese workers thought that by back-stabbing the most productive workers in "struggle sessions" they were working in their long-term self-interest, building the Great Proletarian Society.

How in HELL is it supposed to work in any SUSTAINABLE sense inside corporations run for the benefit of the wealthiest shareholders?

Let Tyler develop his own memory management. The most productive members of a software team have been found to be more productive than the mean by at least one order of magnitude. You need him.

Then, take him and the team on an Outward Bound expedition to have them do physically stressful things so that the team loses its social depression and Tyler learns that there's more than code.