That said, it isn’t _required_ for you to be a jerk; I’ve also worked with incredibly talented people who were generally kind. But they did not go out of their way to network and schmooze. IME, people who are concerned with what others think of them are the least accomplished.
I’ve seen this happen again and again. Nice people become jerks when they become good at tech.
It doesn’t always happen. Plenty of compassionate tech wizards.
I suspect it’s due to the fact that being a jerk gets reactions quicker. “You messed this up, fix it like I tell you or I’ll ruin your reputation” gets more effect than “Let me show you how this works.”
I also suspect that programmers are often so lost in their heads, they don’t take good advice when it’s given.
I’ve been guilty of this. I’ve decided a problem is from X part of the stack, that when an expert in Y says to look in Y I’m like “but that doesn’t effect X!”
- they try their best, they need help, they ask for help, they get it
- they don't put any effort, they go to the expert with the most idiotic questions waiting for solutions to be served. The expert runs out of patience, becomes grumpy with these people
So the experts are not jerks. They are short on patience with super-lazy, super-incompetent people that waste their time.
On the other side, most well-liked people I met were professionally superficial at best, masters of talking and networking, but not delivering much at the end of the day. They were promoted first, so that the entire organization was full of these people promoting similar ones.