Just say that at a previous job we had an amazingly productive programmer whose work quality was somewhat mediocre who could not cooperate with anyone. Anything that he touched turned to spaghetti and nobody else wanted to touch it, and he was inclined to touch anything interesting.

In one random instance he got tired of waiting for people to write a component he needed, so he wrote it himself. The problem was that he was waiting because they were designing it - the component was going to be used for several other things as well. What he wrote did what he needed, but that's it. And it didn't do it well.

You can picture the arguments.

As for what to do about it? Our solution was to give him a section of stuff to work on and kept him busy. Nobody else worked on his stuff and he didn't work on other people's stuff. Where he needed to interact with another developer, I was the developer tasked with that (because I could). This was not actually explained to him, it was just how it worked.

I'm not sure that was the best solution. But it was the easiest to justify to people higher up who were aware of how much he got done (but not so aware of the issues there were with what he got done).

I've seen this phenomena in a number of open source projects. For instance [link|http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000435.html|http://www.sidhe.org...hives/000435.html] touches on a similar personality, Leo T\ufffdtsch, who has been incredibly destructive to Parrot. I can come up with more examples, but I think that everyone else has seen them as well.

Cheers,
Ben