> In my experience, talented developers are usually intelligent enough that they can make up for their shortcoming in the social area by consciously adapting their behaviour.
That's orthogonal to the issue mentioned in the article. For the purposes of "not being a jerk", it doesn't matter if that comes naturally or if you have to devote conscious effort to it; only the resulting behavior matters.
> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.
Survivorship bias. Strange policies or properties are often found in successful companies/projects, who often write up articles about them as though those policies contributed to their success, never considering the possibility that they succeeded in spite of them. The same goes for jerks: some companies/projects succeed in spite of the jerks in (or running) them.
That's orthogonal to the issue mentioned in the article. For the purposes of "not being a jerk", it doesn't matter if that comes naturally or if you have to devote conscious effort to it; only the resulting behavior matters.
> Brilliant jerks are often to be found at the beating heart of successful software.
Survivorship bias. Strange policies or properties are often found in successful companies/projects, who often write up articles about them as though those policies contributed to their success, never considering the possibility that they succeeded in spite of them. The same goes for jerks: some companies/projects succeed in spite of the jerks in (or running) them.