alt Hacker NewsHard disagree. I've yet to see a "brilliant asshole" with anywhere near the kind results I expect from my teams. The usual pattern is your typical asshole will ship broken stuff and then blame everyone else for the breakages.
Now, average assholes who self-promote as brilliant and hope no one will see through their crap, sure, plenty of those. I'd recommend against failing to see through their crap, though. They'll make your actually good engineers leave.
Maybe you had those average assholes masquerading as brilliant? I don't know that of course, but "ships broken stuff" doesn't sound particularly brilliant to me.
I'm thinking of the type that builds things that you can stack up against the output of others and comes out miles ahead. I have one of those in my team, and it feels like a force of nature: he independently does in a month what a team of five did in three, and his work is of better quality. Of course I'll cut him a lot more slack.