Tell you what. When the company is losing a million dollars for every hour the corporate network is down, I’ll just let the much more likeable, but totally clueless and incompetent co worker fix it himself.

We’ll see how much of the company is left when he gets it done.

Thanks for making it acceptable for management to discriminate against us Aspies, for as long as the companies manage to survive the rule of the likeable but incompetent.

I think this varies a lot depending on the environment. I work in an engineering organization where (at least at the low/mid levels) having the right answer is paramount to anything else. There are quite a few people who can be very difficult to deal with. They go unchecked because they are among the best in the company at what they do. Their ability is never questioned and they are consistently called into projects that demand quality. The bottom line seems to be: A lot is tolerated if you can produce the goods. I find this consistent in a lot of companies with engineers.

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Joe, current management research shows that companys suffer  more than they benefit from keeping around a genius who is difficult to deal with. Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford, has a bunch of this research in his new book The No Asshole Rule. The people who always have the right answer always think they are the exception. But they are not. In order to maintain a highly productive workplace, everyone needs to be nice to eachother, not just the dumb people.

Their attention moves to slowly to pick up social cues but because it moves so slow allows them to see more detail than the average joe.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/doidge012201.asp

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I was responding to your comment about “Management How Tos”