Actually your comments about latency brings up a good point. I’ve found that small teams of 4 or so tend to do a lot better than teams of, say, 6 or 8.

As for “jerk programmers” … I guess I came off wrong. After all, I do get frustrated when I get paired up with an absolute novice sometimes. But even a team of very smart people need to be able to work well with each other in order to get work done… otherwise you’ll have grudges, “secret rewrite wars”, and other nasty bad attitudes that result in an ineffecient team.

The moral I was trying to get get across (and I think it’s a pretty obvious one) is that if you’re on a team, ANY team, don’t be a dick. If you have issues with incompetence, either remove the incompetent or move to a better team.

For anyone who sees a little of themselves in that “jerk” programmer, I’d ask them to give working for a smaller company a try. They might find it’s a better fit for their personality.

50% of people are below average.

I agree that sometimes you are the smart one in your team.

However, from my experience, people who are smarter than the rest of their team members are still polite and respectful and puts forth the effort to help other team members in better ways than the ones James mentioned.

First of all, any smart programmer would accept that agile does work even if he doesn’t believe in it. It doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, its just a methodology amongst the few out there that just works.

Also, just because he listed a few qualities of a bad team member, doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a bad programmer or necessarily smarter than anyone else. But if you can’t be a team player, then you have no business being on a team.

Besides, if you’ve never worked with one of those, then you don’t know what the word “HELL” means, unless you’re that kind of person.

True, they can’t outsource ERP customization to India, but they sure can move the entire company there, which means…they won’t need you anymore . Trust me, its happened to a few of my friends.

However, I do know and work with a lot introverts who are great programmers and the best people, but somehow manages to fit in with the extraverts. I think that James is just trying to point out the qualities of a toxic member, which if you’ve ever had to deal with one is a PAIN IN THE ASS!!!!!!!

Also, if you’ve ever met James Carr in person, you’re definitely wrong in your judgement against him. He’s neither a shameless careerist or a saint, just a very bright man who likes to dig deeper than the average programmer, especially a toxic one.

Good point! I think at that point it’s no longer assumption… if you really are the smartest or the brightest on the team then your team should be leveraging that.

If a developer is in the spot that his/her team doesn’t recognize that they really are the smartest on the team, either they aren’t really that smart, haven’t proved themselves, or team politics/feuds are at work that are symptoms of far worse things than how well they meld with the team.