The Ronald Moore Theory

I have occasion to work with a programmer named Ronald Moore. He's brilliant. He's also an arrogant asshole. I know that if something important needs to get done and I bring it to Ronald, two things will happen: 1) He'll yell and swear, and 2) It'll get done: and the end product will be GOOD.

I'm happy to put up with Ronald. It's a colorful break from the otherwise often dull and dreary professional environment I live in. However, people like Ronald represent only a portion of the human population. Based on his two main traits (brilliance and arrogance) and their antipodes (useless and humble), we can classify the entire population into four segments:

1)Arrogant and useless
2)Humble and useless
3)Arrogant and brilliant
4)Humble and brilliant.

The first type are the worst. They're the ones that drag teams down, and dull the results of the people that surround them. They disrupt meetings, promote their own irrelevant agendas, and generally refuse to play by the (constructive) rules. The second type might not contribute in an earth-shattering manner, but at least they're not offensive. And, hey, the world needs people who are good at getting coffee for meetings. The third group, Ronald Moore's group, are somewhat like the second - not ideal, but they're OK. I'm more than happy to live with them. The fourth group: well, I'm not convinced the fourth group really exists. If there are people out there in that group, I'd like to meet them.

Perhaps one day we'll design robots who occupy the fourth group, since us humans seem so bad at it. Then, they can do all our work for us, while padding our fragile egos.