> I'll take the brilliant jerk [over the mediocre nice guy] any day.
Holy false dichotomy, Batman. I'd rather take neither of them and fill my team with adequate-to-exceptional devs who also happen to be decent human beings.
I didn't say there's no middle ground. Of course I'd prefer the brilliant nice guy, but you don't always have that option.
I disagree on 'adequate' though. I'll take a truly brilliant a-hole over 'adequate'. 'Adequate' means I'm often fixing their mistakes, checking up on them, making sure they stay on track, etc. I'm ok with smoothing over issues from time to time if it means I can let them run wild on the thing I hired them for.
If you believe that niceness (the opposite of a jerk?) and brilliance are independently varying traits, and that each are sought after in the market, then you might suspect that eventually those who have the greatest number of independently varying good traits will be more likely to be sniped up by discerning firms than not.
In which case, based on your budget, you'll have to settle with fewer and fewer desirable traits of lesser magnitude, or conversely, based on your budget, you can push more and more less desirable humans to lesser firms; one can imagine thinking the same with customers or clients as well.
You can have the nice paying client, or the jerk paying client, and a discerning firm might prefer nice paying clients over jerk paying clients (but of course, the most important discernment will be over pay), leading their competitors to have to deal with clients with a smaller set of desirable traits.
If brilliant means not mediocre, or above average, they are as rare as they are common. Depends how your budget stretches; If it doesn't, you have to make do.
Holy false dichotomy, Batman. I'd rather take neither of them and fill my team with adequate-to-exceptional devs who also happen to be decent human beings.