Recently, a post named “my colleague, Julius” has sparked quite a discussion on lobste.rs.

In short, the post describes a charismatic colleague who never built competence in development, however his presentation skills and networking grant him better positions and at the same time allow him to avoid criticism for his (simple, numerous and destructive) mistakes.

I will omit AI part of this story, and I’ll call this type of worker Julii, as was suggested in comments.

Discussion provides incoherent pieces of advice:

  1. I believe that to prevent Julii from proliferating one needs to stop making up for their mistakes. Generally I have found that allowing things to fail is a great way to communicate a reality to management…

  2. In a perfect world, sure, but in reality I don’t think this is good advice. When you’re assigned to fix something, don’t say “I can’t, the previous person built it too shitty.” The only thing anyone hears is that you cant…

  3. I have to keep reminding myself that our economic system is built to reward Julius. They’re not at fault for simply being the most fit to survive in the environment we created.

As you can see, those who follow point 2, sabotage intentions of those who follow point 1. Without people following point 2, complain in point 3 would not exist.

Let’s however look at this more practically.

Julii have skills that could be valuable if applied properly, as presentation skills aren’t that common among IT people, especially among the professionals. The problem, though, is that management wants to rely on them making bigger decisions (architecture, work organization) that are outside their competence. There is no trivial way for Julii to get this very different skill set: charisma allowed them to make up for the absence of more common pre-requisites, so Julii are already tuned to solve all problems with charisma, not with technical skills.

So when Julii are valuable? When their energy is directed outside of your organization (outside of team if you’re in a big corp), that’s mostly ‘sales’ of different kind — sales of your product, sales of your tools, sales of your approach, ‘philosophy’, pitching how good the team is for potential hires, etc.

Julii can reach the right people, catch attention, leave a positive impression — unless you’re going into details, and often persuade. While this isn’t making a product, it can still be very valuable.

When Julii are destructive? When they are in charge of process/planning/architecture of things they don’t really understand.

Which brings me to the next point: what to do?

Every eng-manager goes through a technical interview (unless you’ve seen him do that cool thing).

Identifying Julii during interview is simple: start making a fuss/question about non-important details (sane answer — ‘why do you care about this crap?’ — is unthinkable for Julii) or making nonsensical suggestions (disagreeing requires good arguments, senior engineer/manager has to ‘catch’ bad initiatives asap, so that’s a useful readout in any case).

For technical interviews I sometimes ask a simple question that can’t be answered the way it was asked (e.g.: what would be printed after this line? answer: it won’t even compile; what’s the order of elements? answer: set has no order). Julii are very good at reading the answer from your question and body language, and scrambling this priming information forces the interviewee to deeply analyze the question.

Also, don’t allow the interviewee to speak too much outside of the ‘presentational’ interview. Prepared pitches, life stories, unique experiences, etc — those rarely correlate with performance, but bias people a lot.

So when you have an assessment of technical and presentational skills independently, you can decide which areas a person can contribute to, and which areas they actually can cover.

The problem is usually that the hiring manager ignores this with “he has got some very good references” (which Julii have in abundance).