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I think the statement "people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math" is incredibly revealing
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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That's does kind of prove her point. That guy still has a job and likely would not have that job if he were just ok at math. She's not wrong, but hopefully society moves away from that culture and then that guy will have to either adjust or be left behind.
Does it?
He has a job - for now. That guy is famously hard to work with, and colleagues are always trying to shuffle him off to another department and managers get exasperated trying to mediate all the conflicts he’s involved with and when the RIFs hit, guess who’s on the chopping block?
Everyone in those places is good enough at math. But only one is a fucking asshole.
My perception might be tainted by personal experience. If you're good at math and easy to work with, you're golden, but between ok at math/easy to work with and great at math/terrible to work with, in my experience the former is let go before the latter. To a certain extent it makes sense, wether it's publish or perish in academia or maximizing profit in the corporate world, you end up prioritizing the "best" and brightest.
Are you in academia? This has not remotely been my experience in private industry.
Social skills pretty much trump all in engineering. If you write the most hyper efficient machine code, it will be a bitch to maintain and costs the team 10x as much going forward, but if you write code empathetically so that a normal human can pick it up, understand it, and fix it easily, then everyone will love you.
Same thing back when I was in physical engineering, you could have a brilliant idea for a design, but if you can't communicate why it's brilliant and why it's worth getting everyone else to change to accomodate it, then it will get shot down.
Glad to hear that hasn't been your experience. I've been in both now, but I've seen people I wouldn't spit at if on fire get funding or positions because of the work they produce. A guy known for making grad students cry has a line out the door because people want to be associated with him. He's got the funding and pull to make things happen because he's good at what he does, despite being an impossible prick. I think part of it is that there are very few people of the caliber that people will excuse that behavior from. Not every smart person with a bad attitude gets a pass, but in my experience, there's a threshold past which people will excuse a lot. I think there's a similar thing with money. Not every millionaire can get what they want, but at a certain point of wealth they just can. I totally understand if that's not a universal experience. I was just offering my perspective.
Yes this is something I drill into more junior engineers as much as possible - Simplicity is a design consideration. Your designs need to convey what they are doing as clearly, intuitively, and simply as possible. You invented some new thing that automated everything? Congrats, the next person that needs to do a modification or read the drawing to react to an emergency is definitely going to break it, possibly even hurt themselves. Whenever I look at a drawing I can very quickly tell the quality of an engineer by how intuitive the drawing is - and for the quality of the notes they left when they had to do something complex
We have had very different experiences. Social trumps all in RIF discussions. Your boss's boss ('s boss's boss) is the one that made the decision and all he knows is that you organized the potluck last year and are always in-office. He doesn't even know the math guy's name.
Yea, that's completely valid. I imagine personal experience affects this a lot, but I'm glad to see people's experiences have been contrary to what I imagine this woman has likely encountered. Not that anything excuses letting your child's emotional and interpersonal development languish. She's a terrible influence, regardless of if she was correct.
It's also notable that the math guy has extra power in highly technical startups. This has resulted in Silicon Valley placing very high value on him compared to more mature businesses and industries. The brilliant asshole is more of a liability than an asset at GE, they'll be fine without him (ok they won't, but the MBAs made it so they wouldn't be fine with him). The size of the venture heavily limits how much benefit a single engineer can provide, and a culture of putting up with it can result in hefty lawsuits.
But he does know that guy because he’s the one that sends him emails about how rule 46 of the employee manual is not being applied in regards to the Christmas present that Doris got for the cleaning lady, or the endless bickering when he gets passed up for promotion.
That guy stands out. And not in a good way.
then your boss’s boss renames it copilot app
Problem is, he ends up on a bunch of the things that are necessary but boring/unpleasant. So he ends up being the basement troll you can't fire or else the whole company will collapse
We have that guy at my work. Even his teammates actively avoid tasks that involve having to deal with him, so he largely works alone as a result. The worst part is that his boss for whatever reason refuses to do anything about it even when he can see the grief the guy causes to mutiple teams in our org. I bet if his boss was someone else, dude would’ve already been RIF’d.
The problem is all of those things are generally not enough for management to do the very basic documentation required to fire a person.
People like that often end up getting promoted to a position that doesn't interfere with the team.
That guy at my university never developed the skills to work in a corporate environment. Last I heard he is unemployed most of the time
Having jever developed the ability to fail at things, he was also unable to continue academics. He made it through an undergrad on pure intellect. That didn't work so well for grad school
Also undergrad researchers were only making $15/hour, so not like staying in that role indefinitely is a great career
You know you're describing, like, 2/3 of lemmy rn?
I imagine that's a joke, but that's being overly gracious to lemmys collective intellect and insulting to lemmys collective interpersonal skills. Most people I interact with on Lemmy are nice, if not at least cordial, and I don't think being tech savvy equates to the kind of skill I'm attributing to that guy. Unfortunately, knowing what Linux is doesn't actually make you intelligent, despite what even I sometimes like to believe.
We aren't talking about being nice. We're talking about lacking social skills. And I would argue that "autistic nerd who has pegged their social worth to being good at something" is a good proxy for the average lemmy user. And linux user.
We're talking about something deeper than lacking social skills, "That guy" isn't the autistic coworker who blanks out when you attempt small talk. They're the coworker who toes the line of sexual harassment, or who calls their coworkers idiots. It's the person who hears someone brought doughnuts and rushes to eat twice their fair share. A common variant is the person who needs to constantly assert that they're the smartest person in the room, not just by hyping themselves up, but by putting others down. Maybe they eat incredibly pungent food at their desk while others are working. They may repeatedly bring up divisive politics in front of coworkers they know disagree with them.
Yeah I had a job with two of them for a while. Meanwhile my boss was probably autistic and possibly my personally favorite boss I've ever had. Didn't know much about him, but he was always happy to help whoever needed it and treated his subordinates with respect and kindness.
And yeah lemmy has a fair handful of them, but also the internet encourages bad behavior
I don't know the person you were picturing, but me and at least a handful of other people were not talking about autistic people who happen to be nerdy. In my opinion, regularly making people cry in a workplace setting is lacking social skills. Based on just the OP, I imagine that teacher is not sending this home because the son is exhibiting signs of autism, he's probably being a prick, which I'd say most kids are by default, but it's a parents job to help them mature out of that phase. I generally have not experienced any issues working with people on the spectrum, certainly none that would elicit tears, which I think is an ok proxy for some social skills. Obviously, we can have just been thinking of different people, but I have not had many issues on Lemmy and I didn't want people to come away with the impression that Lemmy is 2/3rds hostile or has issues communicating. Most people are pretty nice. Someone even gave me a soup recipe!
I think you and most other people in this thread are making an unfounded leap about what was written in that report card, based on the politics of OOP. But OOP says it was a report card - which is a normal, regular thing to send home with a child. There is no indication the child was sent home early, or that what was written was any kind of repremand. No where does it say that OOP's child made anyone cry.
Presumably, this is an expensive preschool for the children of silicon valley elites, who want their children to recieve an education that will prepare them to be extremely high earners and leaders in industry. These sorts of people typically do acknowledge the large component that being socially aware plays in one's success, and the preschool is likely offering updates and help on social/emotional development as part of their service, since it is something that the parents want. If OOP's child was making other children cry, this info would probably be brought to the parents immediately, since regardless of how wealthy and high status they are, all the other parents are also wealthy and high status and would raise a stink about their kids getting bullied. Otoh, "your kid avoids eye contact and never plays with other kids, just does math and plays with legos alone" would be a fairly normal thing to discuss in the social-emotional development section of a report card.
Similarly, I never said lemmings arent nice. But I would bet that if you gathered a bunch of them together, they would stand around nervously for 45 minutes and just listen to 3 people talk who happened to stumble upon a shared special interest.
I don't presume to know what was on the card, but the cry comment was in reference to an anecdote shared elsewhere in the comments that I thought was in the thread with you. My apologies for that confusion. Overall, I am pretty sure if the kid was exhibiting signs of autism that's probably something you call the parents about and not just note on the report card, whereas just being a prick, which plenty of kids are, is not really parent teacher conference worthy, but still worth mentioning somewhere. Either way, I hope the kid gets assistance if he needs it.
Consider this: Many lemmy users who act like assholes get banned. But face-to-face interactions don't have a paper trail.
That guy would have been director of my department, and I've seen it at two different jobs. Problem is, they are that guy so the bosses keep them around but no one would ever dare promote them to a position of power. It would have been unbearable and everyone would bail quickly.
lol thinking making less and managing reports is what that guy wants
TBH if I was bad at dealing with people but good at the technical aspects of my job, that would be exactly what I want. But IDK, some of these assholes probably think it's fun to be an asshole.
That is really fucking cruel.
Just kill the maladapted people?