As a senior engineer/team lead. What would you do if you had an engineer on your team who is very difficult and arrogant but very good at their job?

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Keep him occupied with high risk challenging hard work.
Try to prevent him from harming the newbies.
Make sure the veterans don't lynch him.

Thats about it.

Let them be themselves

Some people aren't team players. But if nothing else works, you can always just mage him as a team containing only him.

Try get root reason why he's arrogant.
It could be his shitty personality (too bad for him) but also multiple different reasons. From my perspective, few things which made me become an arrogant prick in the past:

- manager don't understand basic tech stuff communicated to him
- manager expecting me attending all meetings and still deliver results during remaining 2 hours of working day
- manager forcing me to increase code coverage and never caring about real tests quality
- coworkers pushing prototype barely-working code to production
- coworkers doing copy-pasting way too much
- manager forcing me to work with a guy who's productivity is negative (me fixing his work, fixing means redoing almost from scratch)

... and so on

Personally, I find that someone who is difficult and arrogant and not a good team player might be a good coder, but not good at their job. Because the job is about more than just writing code. If you can't work with other people, you can't be a good developer unless you're the only developer on the project.

If he's difficult and arrogant, he's not good at his job. Software development is a team effort. If you're not good at working with other team members, you're not good at your job. (Unless you're on a team of 1, but then this person obviously isn't.)

Treat his shortcomings with interpersonal skills like you would treat shortcomings in technical skills. Address them constructively in 1-on-1 meetings. If he accepts the feedback and wants to improve, do what you can to help him improve those skills. Have follow up conversations to monitor progress. OTOH, if he consistently rejects the feedback, well, you may need to ask yourself if he really belongs on the team.

Ultimately it's the team as a whole that's delivering value to the business, not any one individual. If one person is dragging everyone else down by making them feel miserable, then they are harming team productivity, even if their own individual contributions make them seem like a "rock star".

@blurg i worked with good teams when we delivered great outcome.

I also worked with bad teams, where everything had to be explained few times, and you wouldn't trust amy single piece of work without checking it yourself.

Yes, it is team work, when team can be trusted. If team can't be trusted, then it's one big fake.

@bzq84 For sure. If the team members get along fantastically but have bad technical skills, or are not trustworthy, then that's not a good team either.

Team members need to be be able to learn and grow from each other. If one person has outstanding technical strengths, and is happy to share those, then others should be willing to learn from that person and improve. It goes ways. If developers with more expertise, experience, professionalism etc. are routinely ignored, that's also a recipe for terrible outcomes. So absolutely, team leads should hear both sides of the story to ensure that root problems are being addressed.

Talk to them? Give them feedback. Talk about the issues openly, if needed confront them. In many cases they don't even see their behavior problematic and if you honestly describe the issue, they may want to get better. If this happens, coach them to be better.

Talk, punish, talk punish, fire.
It is not that hard.

If you are difficult and arrogant, you are not good at your job. Soft skills count at least the same if not more than hard skills.

At first, give them feedback that their behavior is unacceptable for the workspace, and if they accept it and change, all is well. If they chose to ignore it, let them go.

Also: Don't forget their effect on other colleagues. A decent employee adds, a great one multiplies by setting the potential of others free, a bad one substracts, or even worse, divides by poisoning entire teams. I've seen entire teams leaving a company because somebody toxic was allowed to stay in a central position. It can escalate from there.

They’re nearly always toxic. Even if they have a little cadre of people they like, or who like them, it just becomes in contrast to everyone else. When I was a junior, I would make my lack of respect plain by replying to their boasting/whining-everyone-cc’d emails with nothing but their name in capital letters and max font size. I still do this, for that matter.