Beware of Programmer Egomaniacs

Professional development today is mostly done in teams. This means that it takes more to be a developer than the ability to write code. Coding is very important, but being able to participate in a team is equally important, if not more so.

A developer with a huge ego gets a lower score in my book, no matter how good a programmer he is. The reason? Egos and teams doesn't mix!

In my experience, displays of ego has nothing to do with skills. It's rather the opposite. It seems developers with huge egos are (at best) average programmers. The Dunning-Kruger effect explains it like this:

The less competent people suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability much higher than it actually is. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. 

This is a generalization of course, but it's quite telling and it agrees with much of my own experience.

Egomaniacs tend to boast and exaggerate their knowledge, because they actually believe themselves to be better then they are. That makes it very hard to judge them, especially considering the tendency most of us have to trust the honesty of others.

Some takes this even further...