Don’t Be An Alpha Geek

There’s a fine line between pursuing technical excellence and being an alpha geek.

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Hi this is John with this week’s Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.

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Tip of The Week: Don’t Be An Alpha Geek

“What is this rubbish? Which idiot wrote this code? It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever see!” came booming out of the conference room.

Uh-oh! Jenny thought. A quick look through the glass wall showed the engineers all cowering around the conference table with Simon pacing around the room ranting about the dire code he’d just reviewed.

Jenny stuck her head through the door and asked Simon if he could spare her a minute. They stepped into another meeting room and before she could utter a word Simon was off, “These guys are idiots, they’re writing terrible code, why do we have to have them on the team? I could do it all better on my own!”

Jenny paused, took a deep breath and prepared herself for another challenging conversation with Simon. He was a great engineer, but the rest of the team were scared of upsetting him and incurring his wrath and it was hurting their productivity.

So what’s the problem here?

There’s a fine line between pursuing technical excellent and being an alpha geek and Simon was on the wrong side of the line. An alpha geek is often an excellent software engineer who is driven to always have the right answers, and solve hard problems.

They tend to value technical skills above all else and believe that the best technical person should make all the decisions. It’s therefore inconceivable to them that anyone else should get a say in how things are done.

When they become managers or CTOs things are even worse, they believe they’re creating a culture of excellence, when really they’re creating a culture of fear.

How To Avoid Being The Alpha Geek

To avoid becoming an alpha geek work on your emotional intelligence. In particular focus on developing self-awareness and empathy. Self-awareness helps you be more aware of your behaviour and empathy helps you understand how other people feel.

To develop your self-awareness use introspection. Observe your own thoughts and feelings, but instead of asking “why”, ask “what” questions. For example, instead of asking “why are people intimidated by my technical knowledge”, ask “what am I doing that makes people feel intimidated by me?”

To develop your empathy give looping a go. When you’re speaking to someone, ask a question and give the other person time to answer but don’t stop there. After they’ve answered paraphrase what they’ve said, and follow up with a question such as, “Is that right?” or “What else am I missing?” Focus on what is really important to them. Repeat the process until both of you agree and have a shared understanding. The aim is for you to understand where they are.

If you’re concerned you might be an alpha geek, you might also like to read my earlier post: 12 Ways To Tell If You’re A Difficult Engineer (And What To Do About It) and add considering those 12 points to your introspection.

How To Avoid Promoting An Alpha Geek To A Management Role

If you currently manage a technically brilliant software engineer who is perhaps sometimes difficult to deal with or always has to be the smartest person in the room, please don’t promote them to management.

You won’t be doing them, or the team they will lead a favour, in fact you’ll be hurting them. If the engineer is great, work to keep them and find a way to extend the non-management track in your organisation’s career ladder so they can continue their career as an individual contributor.

What To Do If You’ve Promoted One To A Management Role

If for some reason you’ve promoted an alpha geek to a management role, I’d suggest moving them sideways ASAP. Think about alternative roles they can take. A CTO can become a Chief Science Officer or Chief Architect. An engineering manager or director can become an architect, for example.

What to Do If You Are The Alpha Geek

Instead of focusing on being right, try to focus on what is important. Sometimes it’s technical, sometimes it’s team cohesion, sometimes it’s solving the right problem and sometimes it’s admitting you were wrong.

Don’t just focus on your technical skills, recognise that domain knowledge, business skills and people skills are hugely important too and work on them.

Become a mentor to other engineers. If you can bring yourself to view your mentee as someone to teach and guide and your role is to change your style and approach to what works best for them, then you’ll learn how to share your knowledge in a constructive way without shouting others down. Leading through influence instead of fear.

If you don’t then you might find yourself in the same position as Simon. As great an engineer as he was, Jenny had to let Simon go a couple of months later. For a month or so after that the team struggled but after that the team’s productivity shot up and they did better than ever.

Engineering excellence matters, being likeable and being able to work with the team matters too. Be a leader, not an alpha geek!

Got a story of being or working with an alpha geek? Then please share it in the comments!

Regards, John

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