by keepamovin on 6/7/25, 11:35 AM with 66 comments
by bgwalter on 6/7/25, 2:19 PM
Seems to me that the actual assholes are still employed in that company. Perhaps he was just hired to fix the mess. Once the job was done, he was no longer needed.
by remram on 6/7/25, 2:41 PM
I guess now I have an additional reason to ask, so that I can screen out the assholes that will say it's a dumb question...
by viraptor on 6/7/25, 2:52 PM
by millzlane on 6/7/25, 2:23 PM
by afavour on 6/7/25, 2:31 PM
by laweijfmvo on 6/7/25, 2:59 PM
Jerks come in all sizes.
by wenc on 6/7/25, 5:28 PM
"It was very benign and was probably the most practical question I asked him! Let's say you want to randomly sample 1,000 users out of a table with a user_id column, e.g. so you can get a list of IDs to send a customer feedback form to. How would you do that?"
1. SELECT user_id FROM table LIMIT 1000 -- this gives unordered results, but is not truly random (it's dependent on database retrieval patterns)
2. SELECT user_id FROM table ORDER BY RANDOM() LIMIT 1000 -- this is uniform random, but it's expensive for big tables.
3. SELECT user_id USING SAMPLE reservoir(1000 ROWS) -- this is a fast and memory-efficient streaming method, i.e. Reservoir Sampling [1] in which n is treated as large and unknown (DuckDB supports this sampling method and others: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/samples.html) Reservoir sampling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling) was a hot topic among data scientists on Quora circa 2011.
Sometimes simple questions have deep implications.
by crazydoggers on 6/7/25, 2:33 PM
The goal of a company is to serve its customers and make a profit, not stroke managements egos.
And it sounds more like this guy pointed out what was wrong and maybe embarrassed people, but that doesn’t make him an asshole. It’s one thing to be mean or call people names, that’s an asshole. But this guy was an “asshole” because he was right and it embarrassed people? I’ve seen the type of management that is so insecure they can’t be pointed out what they are doing wrong, sounds more like what happened here.
A good company has management that has a thick skin and acknowledges its missteps and raises up talent. If you can’t admit an employee “lower” than you can point out your flaws and give you criticism, then you’re the problem.
by keepamovin on 6/8/25, 12:24 AM
So the corporate principle is often not against assholery per se, it's against who's permitted by the hierarchy to do it.
I've seen this a few times. There's more assholes among those who have a "manager"-type title. But by no means are all managers assholes. I think it oftens comes down to: 1) emotional immaturity, where people don't know how to execute the duties of the office (getting others to do something) without some kind of abusive coercion / intimidation; 2) also likely comes down to people reflecting the authority style they were raised with - so those who were traumatized by abusive asshole parents are probably going to have that as a model of authority and reflect that when they have authority; 3) finally, I often observed it correlated with obvious insecurity, in that it seems to be a defensive mechanism where people who fear themselves to be incompetent/unworthy will compensate by trying to shore up their position with abuse of their colleagues.
Ideally, promotion should prevent/remediate such behavior, but I guess that the selfish-streak often displayed by assholes is mildly adaptive for the power dynamics involved in getting promoted. As a last point, often I think there's something else, that people tend to trust that "abusive/coercive" assholes will be able to "get shit done" (by, roughly, intimidating their team) - which there is probably some "truth" to, unless a team wholesale revolts against such behavior. Overall this last points reflects some room for improvement in human organizational dynamics in general.
As a counterpoint to the prevailing "assholery" discussion in this thread, it would be really cool I think to see counterexamples in detail of managers who greatly succeeded by being stellar people and really good managers. I think ideally the "asshole manager" trope will become a true relic of history, something antiquated like the tolerated alcoholic hothead, or whatever.
by buggy6257 on 6/7/25, 2:17 PM
It's clear he's brilliant, and experienced, and seems like he's just refusing to "play the game". Speaking truth to power works if you know when to also NOT do it, or how to do it in a way that gets people to listen.
It doesn't really matter how brilliant a guy is; if he's not capable of "playing the game", then he's going to be (and WAS) out on his ass within a short timespan. That's a sink on my team's resources having to hire AGAIN and train AGAIN so short after his hiring. I don't want brilliant jerks, I'd rather have someone decent who can stick around by not getting himself fired for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person.
by localghost3000 on 6/7/25, 2:11 PM
by jinushaun on 6/7/25, 7:04 PM
Sure, on a case by case basis, it’s easy to make the argument that the smart asshole should’ve been more agreeable and tactful. But in the long term, keeping these managers hurts the company more and it’s how you end up with zombie orgs that scrape by.
by senthil_rajasek on 6/7/25, 2:06 PM
by bravesoul2 on 6/7/25, 12:48 PM
by ayhanfuat on 6/7/25, 2:35 PM
by dedicate on 6/7/25, 3:21 PM
They loved his attitude when it challenged broken systems, but the second he aimed that same energy at management's BS, he was out. Makes you wonder... is "culture fit" just code for "won't call out your boss"?