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Well, let's look at it from the "the jerk"'s perspective.

How would feel if other people accomplished 1/10th what you did? What if they got paid 80% of what you got paid too?

What if teaching them took so much of your time that it was faster to do it yourself than hand-hold them through the process?

What if, despite producing more than the rest of the team combined, management saw you as a problem, and wasn't interested in your perspective now that you had a reputation?

Have you asked "the jerk" to be more polite about his feedback? Have you explained why it's important? Have you listened to his perspective?

2 comments

You work to raise your teammates up. Full stop. Productivity for a team is in aggregate - it's the entire teams productivity that's at stake, not an individual contributor's.

This seems to be a pretty ubiquitous view nowadays, but neglects the possibility that some projects might go better with an individual contributor just getting on with it.

An interesting analogy is the tradeoffs in going from one machine to a distributed system: a single SQL server will outperform a 3 node cluster for small loads, but the 3 node cluster will survive hardware failures and eventually out-scale the single-node setup as you add more nodes.

It feels like larger companies are always reluctant to have a single point of failure, whether it's a machine in Utah going down or Greg getting hit by a bus.

It's a good analogy. Setting up the three-node cluster is an awful lot more work, and if you don't do it right there's a real chance that you'll end up with lower real-world reliability than the single node.

That said, I can understand why large companies worry about single points of failure. What perplexes me more is that the you-always-need-a-team mindset is filtering down to smaller and smaller organisations.

That's not how reality works. People are self-interested. The team is secondary, at best. This isn't war, it's software development.

No, you work to get great stuff done. Whether or not your teammates are a worthwhile investment (or whether they even belong at the company at all) is a complicated calculation.

In this case the author describes a jerk who's more effective than the rest of the team combined. In this case, I kind of wonder whether it was a mistake hiring such a team.

Why would you be concerned about coworkers making "too much" in relation to you? I mean, if the company were going to close as a result of pay, then I'd potentially be concerned (more that it's a failing company or a failure of management), but I can't imagine a scenario where I would look at a fellow coworker and have it harm me any that they're getting paid well.