VC blog says that engineers should be less arrogant, more pliable towards VC requests. Cool story from people who want power and don't understand technical problems.
I'm not shy about calling people out on self-serving narratives. If that article pointed at "startups should be more pliant to VC narratives", I'd be throwing down the rhetorical penalty flag, calling Projection on the offense, and telling them to try again.
That all being said... it appears that you're assuming facts not in evidence.
I'm gonna have to go out on a limb and say that OP would need some evidence to convince me that engineers are more arrogant than VC. As opposed to no evidence at all.
This, after all, is a guy who works for pmarca, who, having achieved the status of "rich white person", went on to posit in public that the end of colonialism was bad for India: "Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades." It's possible there were some nuances he was missing.
Could you provide some examples of times when being arrogant improved the quality of the product you delivered?
I've certainly run into arrogant engineers in the past. I spent the 2-3 weeks after the worst of them left cleaning up his bug-ridden, brittle code. If he had worked more collaboratively, it wouldn't have had to be that way.
Correctly identified that a product would be a GDPR problem. Said product's main feature was deanonymizing non-consenting visitors.
Insisted that certain metrics should be recorded, ended up identifying massive gaps in SLA, improved overall QoS.
Was asked to give SRE and Devops advice to a team. Told them to document their "regular tasks"; that is, to write down a doc "How to Upgrade Frob Databases" so that they would have a way to do all the "Upgrade Frob Database for Customer #xxx" tickets on their kanban board. Got pushback. Wrote the docs for them anyway. Their kanban board drained over the next two sprints.
Edit: In all cases, got massive pushback from management and never from devs nor engineers. Was called "arrogant", "troublemaker", "enabler", reprimanded, etc. You asked for examples, you get examples.
Forgive me, but these don't sound like instances of arrogance. You've pointed out flaws in execution or feature, and I would do the same, but that's not arrogance. That's just doing your job as a developer.
Maybe you achieved these in an arrogant way? I'm not going to deny that you can get things done being arrogant. But I don't think it's necessary to getting things done right.
I think he is saying that he got labeled as arrogant because he was not respecting internal office drama and human specifics which were getting in the way of him trying to do his job well. Is that arrogant? It's very context-specific but I'd claim that most of the times it is not.
People calling other people offensive names in offices happens way too many times. Way too many managers and teams got too warm & fuzzy & comfy (and unproductive) and any newcomers who want to get shit done are labelled as "rocking the boat" although not literally but with a ton of euphemisms to conceal the core idea -- like those your parent commenter already mentioned ("troublemaker" etc.).
> Could you provide some examples of times when being arrogant improved the quality of the product you delivered?
Being arrogant and being perceived by other people as arrogant are two completely unrelated pairs of shoes.
I personally would assume that many "nerds", for a lack of "social fluency" (I want to avoid the term "social skills", since in my experience they are not socially "unskilled", but rather think differently from many other people, which makes them often act somewhat clumsily), are perceived as arrogant, while they actually are not. On the other hand, I observe that many people who play the "acting humbly" game are actually deep inside quite arrogant and narcistic.
The post isn't about "Teamwork is important". The title is about "the arrogant engineer". You've elided the thing that made someone angry and then questioned them why they're angry about it. This is not good argumentation.
