> My professional experience involves enough interaction 
  > with extraordinarily talented engineers who have 
  > extremely abrasive personalities.

I agree, very talented engineers tend to be abrasive. I know a handful myself. But each and every one of them is capable, at the very least, of not being an intentional jerk and being basically polite and respectful in their dealings.

Yeah, there's a not-so-subtle line there.

I would be concerned if an employee of mine exhibited that behavior, because I've seen it before. We had a technically brilliant, but socially ... scary ... individual working as a sysadmin. He blew up about a decision to abandon all of our 1-off mail platforms and switch purely to Exchange (rather than GroupWise, which he preferred and most in our location used).

He was the technical lead for our GroupWise deployment, so to voice his dissatisfaction with the decision that idiots in upper management made, he did us the courtesy of wiping out a swath of our employee's mailboxes contained on one of the servers. And, much like this guy but on a grander scale, began erasing the current set of tapes that had backed up most of our servers our location.

We didn't end up losing much, and I can't remember why (we had tapes stored off-site off-line, but they were only moved weekly). The thing that was most shocking was all of the profanity and yelling originating from his cube while he was packing up his things under direct supervision of a member of corporate security. He seemed genuinely surprised he was told his services were no longer necessary (they even laid him off rather than firing him for cause, allowing him severance pay and unemployment during a hiring boom). At no point did he seem like a stable guy. His boss liked him because he was very smart and the result of his cleverness was enough of an improvement to services and reduction in costs that his instabilities could be argued away ("He launched this project that's bringing in X revenue, he's just a little strange, that's all.").

Sad thing: he continued to find employment and continued to get laid off (5 places, I believe), then died at 37 of a heart attack. The guy who noticed the obit forwarded it out to our team like it was some sort of vindication "See, he DIED because he was such a jerk!". Even normally decent people have a mean streak about them, I guess.

So thanks for your single data point of an angry person who was also a sociopath.

Your post is equivalent to writing: "We had a technical guy. Very polite. But he was black. When we asked him to do something he deleted all our work. Turns out he did this at the next five jobs. Be careful hiring black people".

Being black, or white, or martian, or having anger management issues, are not relevant. Being a sociopath is relevant.

If you look at the Anti-Social Personality disorders, this may fall closer to a Cluster B - Histrionic. Which is what many people consider someone with "anger management" issues.

I agree with what I think is the intent of your post, that people with a personality disorder are suffering from something they may not have control of. However, I do think anger management issues are a disorder and are not of a kind with being "black" as there is no inherent disorder associated with being black.

I think that employers have a very real, and legitimate interest in not employing people with severe personality disorders, particularly if they are not under control or in treatment for the disorder. Even then, it doesn't make sense to put some people in a position where they can cripple your company if they are very upset over something.

When understood as a synonym for an acute case of antisocial personality disorder (this is how virtually all people educated in clinical psychology understand it), it's actually one of the primary commonalities of criminals and is an incredibly meaningful way to understand some people.

> Based on the historical patterns though a sociopath was typically someone lacking any type of empathy, so they would do things hurt other people just to amuse themselves by watching the results.

That's a pretty gross over-simplification, there are many comorbid behaviors with sociopathy and they form a whole constellation with which a clinician can diagnose/identify it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

Here's a good start, you may want to educate yourself before you pontificate on the subject. Sociopathy is a very misunderstood disorder by most of the public, although there was a recent book that covered it semi-okay.

I don't think social behaviour (anger management problems) can be compared to someone's race. People will anger management problems can and will react differently in certain situations based on that sole aspect of their personality, which needs to be taken into account.

It was not my intention to mislead, but it appears that I have, my apologies. You are correct in asserting that my anecdote did not equate with the known circumstances of the individuals involved. I don't know him, nor does anyone have the whole story other than him and his boss. I was looking to explain the extreme behavior that correlated.

I apologize for my second single data point: I worked with a guy who occasionally flew off the handle and liked to kick things (usually solid things at the expense of his foot, not the thing being kicked). One time it was a small garbage can with projectiles of reasonable weight in them (and it was intentional, he was very angry and wanted to launch something through the air in a place that would have been otherwise safe to do that). The problem is that while this particular storage room usually just had boxed equipment, that day it had a card for a router that was to be delivered to a customer site. The card cost over $30,000CAD, and after re-ordering its replacement, lost my company significantly more. He was let go, too, but was upset, rather than visibly angry about it (who wouldn't be?). He wasn't scary, ever. He had anger management issues (I thought everyone had those ... and it was just a matter of the degree to which they can prevent those issues from impacting those around them. I drop an occasional f-bomb under my breath when the fucking compiler thinks I'm wrong).

He wasn't black, white or martian, but the consequences of his actions were serious. It was a router card he was delivering, that he had ordered, that he had unboxed and that ultimately he had destroyed.

So, really, I don't hire people with anger management issues, because if I can see that during an interview, chances are it's a much bigger problem (I armchair quarterback as a psychologist, admittedly).

When I see anger management issues in my employees (what few employees I've had), I talk to them, explain what an outburst can cost them, and tell them to feel free to yell at me if they are angry (My employees, lately, have been remote, so I don't have to worry about being hit by a garbage can).

EDIT: replaced the word hurtle with launch, because the former made no sense at all.

Not hiring sociopaths and not hiring people with anger management problems are both great ideas, even if they don't have particularly much to do with each other.

I think this is the crux of the argument. That there are people who are highly technical and good at soft skills proves that it is not a necessary side-effect.

Why would it be? What evidence is there that there is a meaningful correlation beyond pure anecdotes?

I agree with the author. Here's my take: extraordinarily talented engineers have been given carte blanche in this regard because there is an well accepted stereotype. If we stopped accepting this behavior, I believe engineers will adapt, or be replaced by those who can.

I don't expect everybody to be a social butterfly, but I do expect people not to be an outright ass (i.e. 'abrasive personalities')

Seemingly-meaningless boilerplate? I disagree: (1) There's plenty of meaning to be found if you want to pick up a psychology, PR, or sociology book and actively try to learn something about people, (2) People skills are extremely important if your company needs to deal with the public or forge business relationships. You are just making your life difficult if you refuse to acknowledge or learn what most of the world takes for granted.

2) There is a difference between refusing to learn, and learning and seeing no meaning in some of that stuff. The problem with so called people-skills is that they tend to become automated actions, some kind of cargo cult. You can execute them perfectly, and not care a bit about the people you so smoothly interact with. When you see that real thought are dilluted beyond any reconition in a sea of polite babbling you know that something is wrong.

helps them see through the seemingly-meaningless boilerplate and social grease that we call people skills

but I would like to highlight a different aspect of it. Basically, my point (illustrated below, not argued) is that they aren't "seeing through" it, they are seeing it wrong.

You see, I thought exactly this way about "people skills" when I was younger. If those "extraordinarily talented engineers who have extremely abrasive personalities" are anything like me, the they see it as boilerplate and grease because they are thinking of the whole thing from the orientation of utility. Employees have a function, customers have a function, engineers have a function, and why can't just you do your goddamn function and let me do mine? This fits with what I've learned from people who match your description. I myself often fashioned my social interactions from that direction quite deliberately. A highly technical engineer doing business would be very likely to approach "people skills" as another chore with a beginning, a process, and an end that hopefully meets your goals, for example. Those who think that process is "meaningless" are less likely to care how well they do it.

Anyway, pretty soon I learned that people are people, not cogs. Now I have more friends, live a happier life, blah blah blah, buy my book and so can you, but most importantly, I've never had bad blood with an employeer, client, or... anyone, really. Nobody thinks I'm abrasive or mean any more, etc. I'm not going to weigh in on my talent, but I would like to think I started from a similar place, socially, to those engineers. I could be totally off base, but I've been thinking about this for a while. Approach interactions as interactions, from one mind to another, and try to communicate with a person.

I also know plenty of incredibly talented engineers who have great people skills. These engineers tend to rise faster and go further than the ones who are lacking in that area. I'm sure you have found this yourself.

> ... also helps them see through the seemingly-meaningless boilerplate and social grease that we call people skills.

'Seemingly-meaningless' being the key word. Such boilerplate exists for a reason. It would be nice if all communication were perfectly efficient and noone ever had to be anything but perfectly honest but the nature of the world is such that social skills are necessary. They can be learned, as plenty of people here have already attested. It is difficult and frightening but utterly worthwhile. Learn the rituals, play the game, fake it till you make it. Otherwise you are signalling to everyone around you that you don't value their presence enough to even bother with basic social niceties, whether or not that is actually the case.

Or they are just socially inept.

With the same approach I could propose that these talented engineers just see through the meaningless of distance running and hence are unable to run a mile under 4:10. Why, isn't it because they suck at running? Oh no, not that. They just _choose not to run a mile faster than 4:10_, right? No, not right. Why?

Why? Because! If you are a genius at A that doesn't necessarily mean you're a genius at B, C, D, E, F and all the other areas.

Let's not even talk about geniuses, most of the "oh, I can be an asshole" attitude comes from people who haven't actually accomplished anything that great for humanity.

So, it seems that it should be the company’s responsibility to make sure that they don’t talk to frustrated customers — or terminate their accounts — just like the employees without strong computer skills shouldn’t touch the servers.

I think "talented" just means they've spent a lot with an open terminal, and the side-effect of "abrasiveness" is really that sitting down for a long-time makes you tired and grumpy. So instead of crafting really complicated excuses, just go outside for a bit and stretch or something.

  see through the seemingly-meaningless boilerplate 
  and social grease that we call people skills