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nickiter's avatar

"Maybe I’m overthinking all of this - does the myth of the lone genius really affect anyone’s thinking in any substantial way?"

Yes - anti-lone-genius management is an active part of corporate thinking. I was discussing this article with a few friends and they all feel that the "myth of the lone genius" informs their workplaces.

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Nicholas's avatar

Curious to know if those workplaces are involved in software development? That's an area where, due to it being an easy field to be self-taught in and then be able to make functional things, a lot of overconfident "cowboy coders" just kinda barge into a codebase, change a lot of things without trying to understand why anything was done the way it was historically (in favor of ripping old code out and rewriting it from scratch) and then moving on to another project after they get tired of maintaining the software.

The desire/need to counter that in corporate workplaces often stems from the fact that this way of working often focuses on flashy features that look great to the non-technical stakeholders in the project, while the other technical contributors to the project can often see the the mess that this person is making, which will inevitably cause problems for those who are focused on ensuring that the products are maintainable and non-brittle, as the cracks often don't begin to show until after there's been wider adoption (at which point, the "cowboy coder" has received accolades for their shiny new toy and moved on to the next project, never to be seen again.

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nickiter's avatar

One of three is software.

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Harland's avatar

Those aren't "cowboys", those are people high in the personality trait of Openness. They love new things and are easily bored. They like starting projects - finishing them, not so much. New for the sake of new. They are also typically socially adept and liked by others, which makes bringing up their shortcomings sound like sour grapes, especially from the dour low Openness people who do all the hard work of making everything fit.

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Nicholas's avatar

I'm not sure what you think "cowboys" is implying that your armchair psychology is disproving.

I will note, though, that "typically socially adept and liked by others" is not an especially common trait of the types of people I'm describing. Liking new things for newness, definitely. But socially, these people are typically especially non-adept at; he is usually a bit of a loner, who has managed to master a single social skill - that of promising to deliver anything someone else asks of them.

In effect, they're a salesman. As a result, the people who hear their shortcomings are often less perceiving those comments as sour grapes, and more often perceiving them as laziness and/or incompetence, despite them most frequently coming from those who are *less* lazy/incompetent than the cowboy they're describing.

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