I have no problem saying brilliant jerks are uniformly welcome. The few that are excessively jerky- like Jobs- will either prove themselves and achieve dominance, or voluntarily leave the company when they can’t get what they want. They are the rare extreme. The common case is the person who is “difficult to work with” because they aren’t nurtured or managed effectively, or because there are systematic problems they are exposing. These are the brilliant jerks you want in your ranks, creating an awesome company.

Most things in life is on a spectrum, here I see two extremes where jerks are valuable: 1) You can build a company around this kind of person, or 2) you can have sufficient resources to afford to onboard jerks by putting them on projects sufficiently far away from each other that they don’t interact negatively.

But for all the ground in the middle, for all the more moderately-sized groups/companies that most of us associate with, what do you propose? A jerk who goes counter to a culture being established by another jerk will do no good, it’s just going to retard progress if those jerks pull in different directions. There has to be a balance, and in that middle ground I see arguments for *not* hiring someone despite their brilliance.

Ultimately I find the notion of uniformly saying jerks are welcomed as shortsighted as Hastings’s original quote.