We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made • Hacker News Board

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#51

Post by 6nf » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:25 AM UTC

cpncrunch wrote: post #43

davmar wrote: post #26

The author has the audacity to lay 100% of the blame at the feet of his "genius". Sadly, the author will run continually into new sets of problems again and again at his company and each time find a new scapegoat. This is because 1) he cannot recognize that he is the problem and 2) attacks those who has scapegoated in public. Until the author matures, employees would be wise to run in the opposite direction. If they…

Well, I think the "genius" deserves most of the blame. The company obviously shouldn't have allowed this guy to waste 2 years writing crap, but I don't think it's fair to say that the author of this article is "the problem". That's like blaming someone for hiring an incompetent builder to build their house.

The author is not to blame for the problem of course - since the problem existed before his arrival. The author made the problem worse by implementing the wrong solution. The company was lucky to survive this misstep, and poor Rick was forced to work insane hours just to end up being fired anyway. Not a good outcome for anyone.

The company looks bad for mistreating a seriously committed employee.

Rick looks bad because the author decided to slag him off in a public blog post

The author looks bad because he's oblivious to what he's done and instead decided to shit on a really dedicated employee for the failures of the management team.

It takes some serious lack of perspective to post something like this on your public blog. Ugh. I feel sick.

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#52

Post by lazyasciiart » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:26 AM UTC

hacking_again wrote: post #17

This is probably libel, and regardless it's character assassination that reflects more badly on management than it does on Rick.

In the US, it's not libel if it's true. Even aside from that, this doesn't actually identify anyone.

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#53

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:27 AM UTC

davmar wrote: post #26

The author has the audacity to lay 100% of the blame at the feet of his "genius". Sadly, the author will run continually into new sets of problems again and again at his company and each time find a new scapegoat. This is because 1) he cannot recognize that he is the problem and 2) attacks those who has scapegoated in public. Until the author matures, employees would be wise to run in the opposite direction. If they…

[deleted]

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#54

Post by urda » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:30 AM UTC

Thanks to articles like these, it's easy to know what professionals and companies in our field we can avoid.

So many red flags from the author, I'm shocked that any of their talent stayed. What a joke.

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#55

Post by steego » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:34 AM UTC

md224 wrote: post #44

mattbgates wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Avalaxy, while I know companies use tools to do their thing... I don't, I'm old school. I have files on an FTP server and I write PHP code. But to explain: > Author: completely optional, depends on what you are using, you aren't wrong.. since I'm old fashioned, if I were to hire some coder to help me maintain my programs, I'd like to know that he was in there, and I'd have no way of knowing.. again, probably not anyo…

I'm an old school surgeon... I like to operate without using anesthetics or sterilizing my tools.

Much like the old school surgeon, he hops on the production server and types very quickly to minimize website downtime.

"Time Me, Gentlemen!"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/time-me-g...

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#56

Post by didibus » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:35 AM UTC

lucio wrote: post #38

g051051 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but if they wound up throwing away so much supposedly unmaintainable code, then he wasn't the great developer they thought he was.

If he had the respect of his coworkers, I'm guessing "Rick" was really a 10x programmer, BADLY MANAGED. You need somebody else who understand the project objectives and can put a limit to the development of "configurable" options. >Rick’s product supported a dynamic workflow with over fifteen thousand permutations. In reality 99% of our use cases followed one of three paths. The team hard-coded the workflow. This rem…

I've seen a lot of clients and managers ask for infinitely configurable software more often them I've seen devs introduce it as unnecessary complexity. It's often asked by businesses in the hope that afterwards all change are free and don't require a dev to make. Futile for sure, I constantly have to tell the business why that's not sane, and that they actually don't have that many use cases.

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#57

Post by mythrwy » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:36 AM UTC

"Rick was churning out code faster than ever. He was working seven-day weeks, twelve hours a day. .......................... Every day, Rick grew more belligerent and isolated. The mask was coming off. Jekyll was becoming Hyde."

Geezus. What kind of people are running this outfit that they don't see the connection between these two phenomenon?

People who haven't spent enough time around programmers and/or people who haven't spent a serious amount of time coding themselves would be my guess.

Coding 7 days a week 12 hours a day with the entire weight of everything on your shoulders while others have "meetings" and write Medium blog posts will turn Gandi into an asshole soon enough.

Not saying the guy wasn't intrinsically a jerk but this is a ridiculous failure of management. And you are posting about this ridiculous failure in an attempt to scapegoat someone who wasn't managed for the failure of a project that was poorly managed? Shame on you author. Seriously. Grow up.

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#58

Post by chandmk » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:36 AM UTC

While I understand that no one could have gotten to a better conclusion I find it a very distasteful commentary.

So Rick knew everything about the project, while everyone is simply making a living off his work all those months/years, saved the management face many times with miracles, probably not paid n*x, stopped attending meetings because no one understood the stuff anyway, and the author has bad opinion of Rick's code, conveniently ignoring context around Rick's choices, gleefully siding with all those managers who have no clue in the first place and fired the worker to have a new start!!!

Maybe Rick should be given a chance to comment on how bad those project savior choices were.

Now we need to wait and see when would they identify next Rick of the current version of the code when that stops cutting the muster for the flood of new requests.

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#59

Post by mythrwy » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:37 AM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #28

This looks like gross mismanagement. Gross mismanagement of client expectation, gross mismanagement of product scope, gross mismanagement of feature/engineering processes/schedule, lack of leadership, and worst of all, gross mismanagement of talent. It sounds like management has no or very little technical background. Didn't understand how to build the product or translate requested features into feasible functionali…

Sounds like incredibly immature inexperienced people playing startup and playing manager to be honest.

This post doesn't reflect well on the outfit at all. The fact it was even published confirms the above.

Re: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

#60

Post by tempYeez » Sun, Oct 15, 2017, 1:38 AM UTC

Oh I hate Ricks. Programming genius who love to hear themselves speak, bully others into their technical decisions and refuses to be unwavered from predisposed technical biases. There is always some senior engineer with this attitude.