Thoughts on Douchebag engineers in Silicon Valley

I used to read about startup douchebags all the time. These are folks who have been spoilt by the culture of excess in Silicon Valley. They dont have any real skills or have extremely limited skills. But have become a part of Silicon Valley’s culture of excess thanks to being at the right place at the right time. And, even though I regularly interacted with hundreds of folks from across the spectrum, I was thankful that I never really met them.

And the inevitable happened. I met one douchebag. And, I had met them all. .

Here are some typical attributes of these weird species:

1. They’re busy all the time, or at least they’re pretending to be busy. Even if Github/Jira shows no activity whatsoever.
2. They’re busy watching Video games on Twitch. TV while claiming to be working., or wait a min, you’re actually watching videos and trying to work on the side.
3. They don’t like stand-ups because they take away your valuable time.
4. They don’t like a manager because its perfectly fine to make critical engineering decisions all by themselves.
5. They spin up as many as EC2 instances as you can because you know what, “hardware is cheap”, even if it sinks your company.
6. They don’t want to transfer knowledge to others because apparently they are working on a top-secret project which is too hard to be understood by others. Mostly, they’re shit scared that what little they know will be learned by someone else and that they will lose their job.
7. They’re going to going to spend more time socializing, drinking beer and working however they want rather than follow a sprint plan.
8. A sprint plan, is a “waste of time” because it is better to go “with the flow”.
9. Engineering managers & CTOs etc become suddenly irrelevant when the douchebag “brogrammer” is around.
10. Software design, software architecture etc is all over-rated. The douchebag does things because its what, in his own words what “he decided and what’s the right thing to do”.
11. The douchebag has a sidekick or is a sidekick to another douchebag and they often consult each other for advice, sometimes making you question your own knowledge learnt thus far.
12. The douchebag is an arrogant F***; the best part is that even he knows it.
13. Lastly, the douchebag looks at gets 2X the salary of what you might be getting as a manager, that is until he gets fired.