The author is missing a crucial pressure that pushes against weird nerds, the people that have to work underneath them. I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burned.
The author sidesteps the problem entirely by picking the most idealistic Weird Nerd possible: A person who is indisputably talented, accomplished, perseverant, and even benevolently forgives those who wronged her in the past.
In the real world, the "Weird Nerd" rarely checks all of these boxes, let alone most of them. I bet a lot of people will read this and identify as the Weird Nerd despite checking none of the boxes. That's the nature of articles that leave out the nuance and instead give us the most idealized view of a noble scientist who was a victim of the system. It leaves an opening for everyone to feel like they were a victim of the system.
That's why this problem is far more complicated than articles like this would lead you to believe. Many of the "Weird Nerd" people out there aren't perfect scientists or engineers unfairly shunned by the system. Many of them have real flaws of varying degrees that would require a lot of guidance and mentoring even within a perfect system. And it's not easy! In fact, it can be very taxing on teams to work around the quirks of your average (non Noble Prize winning, like this article) Weird Nerd even if they can produce good output, which is why so many companies select for Boring Nerds instead.
I read the article as acknowledging this pressure by arguing that Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions. Without the workplace pressure on Weird Nerds to become people managers, would they still manage people? Maybe not.
I can’t speak for academia, but in tech companies I’ve worked at I’ve seen a marked improvement in management when there’s a tech track for engineer advancement such that they never need to become managers, if they don’t want.
Being a professor at a research university is really multiple non-overlapping jobs all at once: managing your research group, bringing in funding and publicity, helping run your department and research community, and teaching classes. PhD programs really only prepare you for the nuts-and-bolts of research, and maybe teaching. Only if you're lucky, your advisor was thoughtful enough to make proper introductions to help you get started on funding and prestige out of the gate.
It's not surprising that lots of people opt out or wash out of this system because the expectations don't match the formal preparation for it.
You can blame the bureaucrats for this multi-facted outcome. Their ever-increasing pressure of getting new funding and balancing your books with frequent budget updates is what leads to so much time spent on those activities. And of course they tie those activities to your promotion, instead of the importance of your discoveries which is what should be the only thing that matters.
From a certain perspective, there are two kinds of fields in the academia: "laboratory science" and everything else. If you want to make a career in laboratory science, you need to be a manager and a professional beggar. You need to bring in money to hire people to do your research, and you need to support the administration with grant overheads. If you are good at the job, you pay the administration more than they pay you. Long-term non-manager positions are rare, because they are more expensive for the university than successful managers.
Outside laboratory science, the expectation to bring in funding is not as strong. You don't need much money to do research, and grants are not as readily available. As far as the administration is concerned, if you do your teaching duty without too many issues, you can use the rest of your time as you see fit. Academic politics revolve more around personal relationships with the tenured people at your department.
Even if you’re not doing performance reviews there’s still a need for directing people technically when the work exceeds what one person(even a 10xer(if such a thing really exists), and that’s where you need some minimum amount of EQ
I think the contention is that playing political games, as quoted in the article, is beyond the minimum amount of EQ normally expected for a non-management role.
Problem is that many places design their ladder such that non-managers are expected to do manager-like work past a certain level. This is to much dismay of those people who are not trained in management skills, and most of the skills they have acquired thus far are no longer being put to good use. These Weird Nerds may very well understand that being at the next level means making impact that exceeds what one person can do alone, nonetheless they will become increasingly unhappy at those roles. Maybe they will leave, maybe they will avoid getting promoted to higher levels in the first place.
I mean it really depends where the weird nerd is. I mean I can say I'm on the border of weird nerd myself, though I say I have enough EQ to get around. Never want to manage people, and have a "high enough" position for myself. The company I work for is in the middle of a new software project and just a few months in I layed out a document stating how and where the software was going to hit failure points that were going to cause outages/degradations of service. Nine months later those failures started occurring like dominoes. We had to stop on new deliveries and work on performance for months.
I mean the entire VC culture is ate up with the 10x CEO, the fact that a few other people lower down the totem pole can 10x in their narrow field shouldn't be a surprise.
> Weird Nerds should not be forced into people management positions
Let's forget the Weird Nerds for a minute and look at the following situation: a person W is technically savvy enough to have accomplished a big chunk of project X. Say, 90%. And then there is a 10% left which takes as much work. So management hires people from a consultancy to pick up the 10%. Except that these guys don't write much code. They are adept at finding their way into technical management at light speed and want to push what should be their work back to W, while doing the bare minimum otherwise. Now W has more work than before, because he has been pushed into politics. At the very least, he will need to communicate to his colleagues that they need to pick up the slack for real. With some luck, W will find a nice way to do that, but that's the kind of problem he is ill-equipped to handle.
There is something in this article which is overlooked in these comments: people like Katalin Karikó are often under a lot of pressure to perform. They can have crippling debts, or be supporting an elderly parent or relative. Or fear something as life-wrecking as a deportation. They don't get the luxury of being "average", because there are more desirable "average" candidates than them: people who speaks with the right accent or in the right cultural code.
Many weird nerds are on the spectrum and require very good people managers above them to mitigate their quirks, and should never go into people management themselves.
The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good. The former is scalable at least, the latter breaks down as no one can get along.
Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort. It's good to have a mix of perspectives and temperaments in a team to keep poeple creative and honest. But the team ultimately has to cohere in order to deliver. That's really the core job of a manager: to create an environment where people can work together meaningfully and direct it to productive ends.
I totally empathize with this, but there are hardly many people managers who can pull that off. And often those that can get promoted up quickly so that they aren’t managing teams directly anymore. It is much easier to produce with mediocre people managers with a team of socially well adjusted mediocre programmers, than a unicorn people manager with a diverse team of highly skilled programmers who aren’t necessarily great at social skills.
Individual efforts are completely different. A programmer like Notch can produce Minecraft on his own and then just get help to push it into a maintained product. This happens all the time, but you can’t produce that easily (and definitely not consistently) at the big corp level.
> Any non-trivial engineering or research is a team effort
There's plenty of counterexamples in the software space, to the point where most great software was originally written by a single person - C, Unix, Linux, Git, TeX, Python, Ruby, Perl, SQLite, QEMU...
Most of these now have huge teams maintaining them of course, but the initial research and engineering that was needed to come up with the golden egg is usually a one man show. C designed by committee is COBOL.
This isn’t true, most of the best software is written by individuals. Even inside large tech companies, it still happens that major value is created by one person.
> The industry has really changed though. It is much easier to hire social well adapted people who can code at all than to hire a bunch of people with social problems who can code really good
If you have no financial constraints? In what world do you spend massive amounts of money to mitigate people being "weird"?
The shift to high level languages like COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN from machine language? The shift to GC languages? The shift to vastly inefficient but easy to use scripting languages like Python? There's a long history of trading off CPU/RAM/storage efficiency (i.e. massive amounts of money) to make computing accessible to less and less nerdy people.
Those also save time for all people? Which also saves money? I don't think anyone was like, "we need a language to save us from having to hire all these weird people!"
You conflate two things that are actually quite different. You don't need to be friends with the Weird Nerd, but you do absolutely have to respect their expertise in the subject matter, especially when it exceeds yours. It's in your employer's interest to do so. Not doing so means you're being less than professional and might secretly be jealous of this person for having attained a higher level of technical achievement than your own.
Respect for your knowledge, yes - but if you're the world's top expert in Subject X, while simultaneously world-renowned for being an unpleasant asshole, don't expect people to interact with you more than the absolute bare minimum required to do the job.
And frankly, nobody's irreplaceable. If you're #1 in the world, but casually drop racist and sexist slurs, odds are that the #2 expert in the world isn't that much worse than you, nor #3..#10.
And that's fine for most weird nerds. Being cordial and respecting of knowledge is all that's needed in the workplace. Most wns wouldn't make good friendship material either. Their opinions and tastes have a wide range from normal to rather eclectic. But without these people you will never be able to deliver the next new search paradigm. That's how they bring value and that's why the employer hires them. They also tend to be the ones that work very long hours, tinkering with stuff because it's "fun."
Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
> Being cordial and respecting of knowledge is all that's needed in the workplace.
Yes - but a lot of Weird Nerds aren't willing to be cordial. I said in another comment that I think that one of the reasons they find their home online is because online, others can walk away from their comments when they need a break from them; something that's much harder to do at work, when you're face to face with them in a meeting, or at the watercooler, or in the bathroom where they followed you to continue their argument.
> Re: racism and sexism, I suspect that's not just wns and may have more to do with upbringing than personality. Most wns tend to be free-thinkers, and barring some oddballs, they tend to self-select out of that way of thinking.
I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
When someone is not willing to be cordial, you don't have to be cordial in return.
> I wildly disagree that racism and sexism - especially if you were brought up in it - is something most people, especially weird nerds who have a very high opinion of their intelligence - "think your way out of".
I don't think we're disagreeing. Certainly the way we're molded in our formative years is hard to break out of. That wns tend to be freethinkers is also true, after all their differences in thinking are what set them apart from regular members of society. I'm positing that freethinkers have a much better chance of breaking the mold than regular people.
I'm not sure of your tone in this conversation though. Are you perhaps uncomfortable with individuals who think differently from you? That is often the root of intolerance my friend.
> And that's fine for most weird nerds. Being cordial and respecting of knowledge is all that's needed in the workplace.
Well, no it isn't. That was the point of the top comment in the chain: the commenter worked for Weird Nerd, found them insufferable, told everyone they were insufferable and that working for them sucked, and as a result the Weird Nerd's career has tanked because no one new will work with them. There really aren't many cases where you can Go It Alone without any support from anybody, even if you're brilliant.
I will maintain that being insufferable is largely orthogonal to being a Weird Nerd. You can be an obnoxious blowhard who is also largely insufferable. Most wns keep to themselves and don't seek out the limelight.
> that working for them sucked, and as a result the Weird Nerd's career has tanked because no one new will work with them.
We don't know for a fact that that's what killed their career. That's just the op's impression having worked with the person. The real truth is often muddy. And of course we've all met people who are extremely insufferable to their subordinates and peers but manage upwards very well and go on to very fruitful careers.
The author bemoans that any org that is not sufficiently pro-weird-nerd becomes anti-weird-nerd, and in conjunction with this comment which laments the experience of working under one alongside my own experiences of similar, I think it's worth remarking that many Weird Nerds not only do not foster social skills of any sort, but in fact view this as a badge of honor, as "proof" of their weirdness, and just, I'm over that shit.
I love weird nerds, I love the sort of people who obsess about things, who work on them as obsessively as I do, I love info dumps, I love people who are passionate even about bizarre, niche shit I don't care about (actually, I love them even more for it!) but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you.
And I fully accept that autism runs through this pack of people like a freight train, and that's fair, I am always down to provide accommodations, I will talk to people how they need to be talked to, I will bend the norms of social interaction so it's more palatable, all of that, zero issues whatsoever. But even with that in consideration, relationships of all kinds are a give and take, and if all you do is take, people will notice, and people will avoid you.
> but seriously. You need to be able to hold a conversation. You need to be able to talk productively with your fellow people, including difficult conversations. You need to open to negative feedback, to be able to take criticism or contrary viewpoints without turning into a puddle of some combination of depression/rage/self-hatred, or people are just not going to get on with you.
You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits lol no they don't it's just that they exhibit more of group-thinking and less individualism, so they provoke less situations that might potentially cause conflict.
My experience with nerds is "ok each has their own opinion this is going to be difficult but let's try cooperating" whereas non-nerds act exclusively "my way or the highway" because they have never previously encountered the idea that their view of the world might be wrong "because I'm the majority".
> You implying that non-nerds have any of these traits
The thesis of the initial discussion is that it is unfair to hold "weird nerds" to certain standards.
The person you are responding to is claiming that actually some of these standards are important.
Your response to that of claiming that the standards are important is to say that actually normal people don't pass those standards either.
This doesn't refute the argument that the standards are important, but would actually agree with them that actually yes it is totally fine to hold people to important standards, weird nerd or not. (And in fact, you think the weird nerds are even better are following the standards! So what is the issue of holding them to those standards then?)
When people say "I want you to have good social skills" they think "I want you to collaborate with others and not cause drama". These two might seem similar but they aren't. It's okay to expect people to live up to expectations, but at the same time you might admit that these expectations are unfair and put certain people in disadvantage because of their innate traits.
Imagine you have an all-Arab company and you hire a Jew. Of course there's going to be a lot of drama, even it that particular employee has fantastic social skills, and would thrive in an environment full of people from their own culture.
My point is, in order to achieve the same result "collaborate with others and not cause drama" nerds need much higher social skills than non-nerds, simply because they're a minority.
It might reasonable to hold people to important standards, while these standards might be inherently unfair. It depends on whether you value effects or effort.
I would absolutely, 100% expect professional behavior from a bunch of arabs and a Jew who found themselves working together, and it's frankly illuminating that that was your go-to as a scenario that would inevitably cause workplace friction, especially following a line about "innate traits."
And that's before we get into nerds being a minority which is just... no. Nerd shit is so mainstream at this point and co-opting minority status to talk about you really being into geology or something is... a lot.
There's a lot going on here and I'm not interested in unpacking it, have a lovely day.
Your reply can be summarized as "workplace is magically immune to natural friction that occurs when people from vastly different social groups interact because I strongly believe in HR's wishful thinking and besides, talking about two social groups that are commonly known to hate each other to the point that they don't want to recognize each other's statehood is just non-compliant and goes against our community standards"
Yes, the weird nerd is rarely a good people manager. As useful as they might be as an individual contributor when property channeled, they can easily be a -10x contributor when you put them in charge of people.
I disagree. A "weird nerd" is much better in leadership than a socially adept careerist to parachutes in to get a bump on their resume. To build good products you need to care. A "weird nerd" is more likely to care.
It would help your point to separate design leadership from supervisory management. You do not want weird nerds in charge of personnel decisions beyond "Yes, we get along" and "No, we don't"; you do want them in decision-making roles about the product.
care, yes but caring about the right things in product is a process of discipline and organizational/ market knowledge. Its not hard to imagine pursuing the most interesting qualities at the cost of core functionality. (hypothetical - such as insisting that the buttons on my cable box have the touch of a mechanical keyboard)
edit: to be fair, it is extremely necessary to have both voices at the table challenging one another
There's really no such thing as "working with computers" (as is often said), because every piece of tech was made by and for humans, so social skills always matter. The hardest projects I've succeeded at depended on looking at things that way, even purely technical solo ones.
> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life,
I wouldn't want to tar all people who might be perceived as Weird Nerd, based on one data point (which AFAIK might not even be due to them being a Weird Nerd).
Almost all of the too-many people I've seen burn others under their influence, I wouldn't have called any of them Weird Nerd. And none of them appeared to be geniuses. Rather they tended to be at least somewhat successful as political operators, unlike how the article characterizes Weird Nerd. (Arrogant seemed to be the most common attribute, then greedy, dishonest, and unprintable bad word.)
Someone might decide to call some of those FTX cryptocurrency scammers Weird Nerds, but you could also just call them overprivileged brats with consequently warped worldviews.
> I’ve had to answer to a Weird Nerd when I was starting out in my field, it was the worst fucking experience of my life, and I’ve spent the years since warning people away from that person, their career and their contributions to their field have stagnated due to all the people like me that they burned.
And in what way is Katalin Karikó responsible for your mistreatment? I doubt you would have said something similar about a black or gay former manager, attributing your mistreatment to their race or sexual orientation. But for some reason it’s perfectly acceptable to attribute it to a Weird Nerd personality.
