Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Bigotry against the Brilliant

This article is a great example of what I call Bigotry Against the Brilliant. Mistakes were made on both sides in the management of Josh in this article- he's clearly got some mental problem on the AC spectrum, including both delusions of grandeur and inadequacy, or else he wouldn't write code the way he does.

But instead of dealing with him in an appropriate way- limiting his involvement on projects to black box classes with well defined inputs and outputs- they first "relied on him as a crutch" to turn out code at the highly impressive rate incompetent managers like, THEN turned around and punished him for "not being a team player". They took his inability to document as a positive, then turned around and used it as a negative instead of, gasp, giving him a project manager who can do their job of pre-documenting the requirements.

And then they just let this brilliant programmer be insulted by a new manager and "disappear"- causing thousands of hours of code rewrite by less brilliant minds.

NOBODY in this "Quirky Developer story" treated Josh like a human being. And what they probably don't realize is that the whole situation was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act- which requires reasonable accommodation for such disabilities.

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Oustside The Asylum by Ted Seeber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
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