Nice and incompetent is often harder to deal with though. If someone is a jerk and incompetent, the solution is easy. You just fire that person, documenting the reasons is usually pretty easy, and nobody remaining feels bad about it.

Nice and incompetent (assuming the person really is incompetent) is usually a lot harder. The business decision should be the same: fire them. But for most non-sociopaths, nobody wants to fire nice people, and their incompetence usually lingers much longer.

On the flip side you see much of the same dynamic. Everyone loves brilliant nice people, so you keep them around. When it comes to brilliant jerks, I've found that most of the time , if they really are brilliant, they can be coached to understand their jerkiness is an impediment to their business/career goals, and will at least acknowledge it and try to keep it under wraps. But if they don't, at this stage of my life I just don't think it's worth it. They can go be super successful somewhere else, but my life is too short to be around someone a considerable portion of the day who is just toxic.

I also think it's important to clarify what being "a jerk" means - there's a difference between being brash and short and being a toxic jerk. I mean, I think most people would classify Steve Jobs as a jerk by the dictionary definition, but he obviously wasn't a jerk that was toxic to the organization. On the contrary, he was a giant motivating force, and many people have said they did the best work of their lives working for him and are grateful for the opportunity.

> I also think it's important to clarify what being "a jerk" means - there's a difference between being brash and short and being a toxic jerk. I mean, I think most people would classify Steve Jobs as a jerk by the dictionary definition, but he obviously wasn't a jerk that was toxic to the organization.

The problem with "kind of jerks" at the helm is that people further down the totem pole look up to their leaders as examples of how to behave, and it is a lot easier to adopt "jerkness" into your behavior than it is to adopt the more subtle, effective parts of Jobs's personality and behavior that enabled Apple to succeed. So as they say, the fish rots from the head. The leader's SVPs take on a mildly "jerk" persona because that's the example set, their VPs look at their SVPs and become mostly jerks, their Directors become raging assholes, and before you know it, the whole management chain is toxic.

>Nice and incompetent (assuming the person really is incompetent)

YMMV and it can really depend on the pedigree of work. But personally I've never ran into a truly incompetent nice person. Very few incompotent jerks who were fortunately let go quickly, but the closest I can recall is a really nice lead who clearly wasn't lead material. But they were an absolutely brilliant IC and clearly had knowledge to spread to others. You can tell why they made him a lead; he was more or less a "guru" of sorts who constantly got people unstuck from some sticky situations. Being a helpful IC isn't the same as being a lead, though.

But otherwise, I don't know. At least, I've never run into those "can't do fizzbuzz" levels of programmers who somehow got hired.

Hmm, on the contrary, I've encountered a bunch of really nice (and not just nice, but generally awesome) people who were very mediocre at the core of their jobs. Usually these are not in technical, software dev roles, but in areas like product management and marketing.

And I don't think this is just my bias, but as much as people love to crap on leetcode-style engineering interviews, they do ensure an objective bar of programming ability: I have never seen someone do great at programming problem interviews who then struggled to program on the job (but they certainly may have had other issues). But the interviews I've sat in on for roles like product management and marketing had less of an objective bar, so it was generally easier for someone with a great personality to get hired in those roles.

>but as much as people love to crap on leetcode-style engineering interviews, they do ensure an objective bar of programming ability

sure, but the further past junior you go, the less programming ability really matters to your day to day job. There's stuff I'm doing on a technical level now that I woulda done just fine 7 years ago in college, but lacking the ability to properly integrate it into a proper PR, communicate with systems/product owners on requirements, iterate on based on customer feedback, and overall maintain with other legacy code in mind. That's gained from experience working on a large codebase, not by hacking away at your ability to find the longest palindrome substring on a whiteboard.

It's inevitable to ask those questions to a junior who lacks work experience, but it's really annoying that I have to study trivia like that some 7+ years into industry. Or that some companies are so paranoid about me answering their trivia quiz offline that they want to compromise my machine's privacy to check on me siting at my computer in thought. I'm gonna be googling documentation on the job anyway, so at least ask me about concepts if you need to probe.

>But the interviews I've sat in on for roles like product management and marketing had less of an objective bar, so it was generally easier for someone with a great personality to get hired in those roles.

I agree, it's hard to gauge those skills, harder to build those skills without having a job first (catch 22) and nearly impossible to assess in any technical test. These are parts of business that can fail even if you do nothing wrong on a technical level, and since society is so blame-first, we never truly assess how much of that is on the market, the individual, or the product.

I do agree it's nice to have something more objective for a technical role. I just think it's a shame that I'm still being asked to implement atoi for a graphics programmer interview. What does that have to do my ability to send data to a GPU?

Incompetent jerks do very well in corporate. They usually have very clear idea about who the boss is - boss gets to be treated very nicely. Peers are subtly badmouted and criticized when they can't defend themselves. And the most jerkness goes to peers they don't need and such.

Toxic jerks are not just autistic-like unaware of social situations. They are fully aware when they can and can not afford it.