Depends i guess - if you've got a teammate that is plainly and repeatedly careless/incompetent in his doing you're not exactly going to throw your hands up and think "This is fine, the research says it is", right?
Anecdata: colleague of mine at least twice a week reboots production servers during the day, sometimes by themselves, sometimes along with their ESX-hosts...
His response? "Oops."
Does he ever learn from it? Doesn't look like it...
I mean, i'm not exactly working at a hospital or something - i.e. no peoples lives on the line, but try to explain for the n-th time to someone whose last hours work was lost because someone couldn't be bothered to check if he can reboot that server now or not?
I understand that HN leans toward research as the final word on everything, but sometimes anecdotal evidence is pretty accurate. It's like saying "but the poll researches are saying candidate X is going to win". Then a seasoned advisor actually lands on the ground and counts the yard signs and talks to people, and the picture becomes much less clear.
Not to mention that the "research paper" industry is often very manipulated, inaccurate, and sometimes downright fraudulent. Ironically, also discussed on HN once a blue moon.
What I am saying is, do site the "research papers", but don't use that to shut down an argument. It's a clue, not a fact.
The anecdotal evidence also has a negative bias. Given two results from a research paper a person is more likely to share a negative result to a positive results. This is anecdotal evidence .
But that actually makes the result even more significant. Class projects are heavily dependent on every student in the group pulling their part. Someone who is nice but incompetent may cost a student several grade levels, while a competent asshole may allow for them to coast along and still receive a top grade.
This is a study of MBA students. I'm pretty sure you'd get very different results if you asked CS students, there I think people would take the unfriendly genius who guarantees them an A+ on the assignment over the friendly guy who doesn't contribute anything.
According to the article the actual research showed that people preferred trustworthy and competent over trustworthy and friendly. They preferred trustworthy and friendly over just competent.
The people in the research are students and we know nothing about their experience in any real work environment, or if they have been in a position where the progress on their tasks/teams depends on the competence level of their co-workers.
Really depending on the people. Sometime I prefer prefer friendliness over competence. However if the competency involves me doing work to cover for the other colleague, then I take unfriendliness and competent anytime.
I was sharing my subjective preference and the reasons for my preference. The research is surveying other people's subjective preferences. There is no conflict here.
