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We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

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

#101

Post by fellellor »

6nf wrote: post #51
cpncrunch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

This is what I was thinking about. The whole post just seems petty. You don't want indispensable employees unless you know how to manage them. Instead of acknowledging that mistake, just going on to pat yourself on the back for pisspoor management is just disgusting.

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

#102

Post by mortyRolled »

Oh, but the guy, Rick, kind of catches some blame too, even if you might point out that permitting him to hoard the project as a lone cowboy is terrible management.

If this discussion is filled with developers who are able to recognize the poor leadership and planning that permitted an individual, acting alone, to corner all software development tasks, and hoard the project’s codebase, why did Rick fail to notice the same thing? Or worse, continue apace, fully aware of the problem, and its resulting toxicity seeping into the atmosphere of the operation?

Is Rick blameless, even if our recognition is granted the conceit of hindsight?

Placed in the same shoes, would you see the trainwreck approaching? Would you jump ship before the finger pointing started? Would you communicate, enlist support, and try to adjust expectations in the face of vapid, idealistic tech-industry pageantry?

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

#103

Post by rorykoehler »

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…

A good programmer solves the given problem in the most simple, decoupled, way possible. Their solution will inevitably be easy for other devs to jump in and understand and work one with breaking the rest of the code base.

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

#104

Post by joshmn »

wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #2

TBH, I read this as: we mismanaged the project for months (years?), reduced scope creep by negotiating with the client, and finally implemented what should have been the version 1.0 solution while shifting the blame entirely on the loner dev who worked himself into a corner trying to catch up to our sales department's untenable promises. Everyone created the problem, the dev was an easy target to eat the blame becaus…

I agree.

Maybe some of the developers weren't exactly up to snuff as well. Code — across an entire domain — typically doesn't vary as much in complexity as people's ability or knowledge can/would/does/is.

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

#105

Post by wdewind »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #98
wdewind wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but you're making a massive stretch by implying the either Einstein or Feynman were known as toxic assholes by basically anyone (except maybe Einstein's wives). And while one can of course say that someone is a genius at a sport, I meant specifically intellectually, and even more specifically I wanted to combat the notion that it is common for software engineers to be geniuses and total assholes. I just hav…

There are plenty of geniuses throughout history who were asseholes but still brilliant. EQ and IQ are not highly correlated at all.

> There are plenty of geniuses throughout history who were asseholes but still brilliant.

Agreed, as I said humans are complex and I'm sure you can find exceptions. Just talking about general trends here.

> EQ and IQ are not highly correlated at all.

Assuming by EQ you mean being a nice person and intelligence are not correlated I don't agree. Tons of studies backing this up (as well as correlation with overall happiness). Here are two:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12061571

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12309/full

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

#106

Post by mercer »

thisisit wrote: post #99
wakeywakeywakey wrote: post #2

TBH, I read this as: we mismanaged the project for months (years?), reduced scope creep by negotiating with the client, and finally implemented what should have been the version 1.0 solution while shifting the blame entirely on the loner dev who worked himself into a corner trying to catch up to our sales department's untenable promises. Everyone created the problem, the dev was an easy target to eat the blame becaus…

This thing reminded of a sketch I saw sometime ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

This gives me flashbacks...

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

#107

Post by account193 »

Avalaxy wrote: post #8
mattbgates wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I have to agree with you. The fact that Rick was allowed to be turned from a Dr. Jekyll to a Mr. Hyde is kind of the company's fault. No one stepped in to hold Rick accountable during meetings? While I no longer work there, my first job with some programming had me training to understand the code, what it was about, and even how to write it. To this day, I still use this method so I don't get lost or bored in…

> AUTHOR: MG This is already in your commit history, so why hardcode it into the source? > FILENAME: functions.php This is obvious because you just opened the file. So again, why even put it there? When the file gets renamed the documentation is no longer correct? These things are also hard to refactor. > STATUS: ACTIVE Every part of the code is always active... > PURPOSE: All of the functions for this application (a…

I will have to admit that this GIT/SVN is a very elegant solution in the ideal world, but in my experience real world code gets very very messy. Teams get lazy and don't always give very detailed commenting in version control.

Startups may be better at this, but the corporate world is even messier with quick turned spaghetti code. Any markup in the codebase itself helps the next developer tremendously.

Personally, I find @mattbgates best practice to be very justifiable in practical use.

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

#108

Post by seanmcdirmid »

wdewind wrote: post #105
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of geniuses throughout history who were asseholes but still brilliant. EQ and IQ are not highly correlated at all.

> There are plenty of geniuses throughout history who were asseholes but still brilliant. Agreed, as I said humans are complex and I'm sure you can find exceptions. Just talking about general trends here. > EQ and IQ are not highly correlated at all. Assuming by EQ you mean being a nice person and intelligence are not correlated I don't agree. Tons of studies backing this up (as well as correlation with overall happi…

EQ means emotional intelligence, the ability to empathize with people effectively, allowing people to take hints via social cues when they are being annoying or otherwise engaging in asshole-like behavior.

As geniuses are already extreme outliers. For one thing, they do not typically fit in very well with their peers, often leading to seemingly anti-social behavior.

None of the articles you link directly correlate EQ to intelligence, they corrleate it to civic minded ness, and getting good grades in school. Social people do well in social environments is not surprising.

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

#110

Post by wwwater »

ironchef253 wrote: post #66

Plenty of blame to go around. I have turned into Rick before. I was a super productive engineer and I would work way ahead of the company in isolation and get things done super fast. This was caused by me being a workaholic and enjoying my work too much, not really caring about or paying attention to what was going on around me politically. It never occurred to me that pulling way ahead of the company would only resu…

Thank you for sharing!

> When I behaved this way in the past, a strong mentor or manager would have helped me immensely. Instead I had managers who were scared of me because I was more talented than they were and just wanted me to go away.

I think this is the cornerstone of the problem, that there rarely are more than one strong personalities in a team, because each strong personality is like a positively charged nucleus that attracts electrons but repels other strong personalities.

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