You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy

Management had to figure out they needed to handle the escalations, prioritize, reduce the bottleneck, document the solutions, and teach others to fish.

This article seems to be addressing the same issue, albeit a bit more confrontationally. Anyone have recommendations for a non-fictional book on how managers can identify these problems and implement people-centric solutions?

And thank you for the reminder of that. It occurred to me reading the original article and this reply to it that I may be somewhat putting myself in a Rick situation right now.

I don't have any good book recommendations, but I'd be delighted if anyone else did :)

I mean, Rick's a dick, no doubt. But much like Frankenstein's monster, it's incredibly easy to see who had a hand in transforming Rick into what he became. It's hard to read the original article and not see several large "where the hell was management" red flags:

> Any time there was a particularly challenging problem, Rick would handle it.

That's a management failure, and a particularly egregious one that I see new or overly passive managers make. How do you expect one person not to have all of your domain knowledge if they're solving all of the challenging problems?

Fixing this doesn't even involve being super confrontational:

"I'll fix ." "Hey, Rick, you're already working on XYZ and I want Summer to get some experience working with our database system, so I'd like for her to do it."

> First, he created a cult of dependence.

Because management idly sat by and let him do that. People want to feel irreplaceable and like they're exceptional. One way to do that is to create this cult of dependence. Management's job is to step in and re-assure Rick that he's a valued member of the team while also directly confronting this cult of dependence.

We do this all the time at my job, and we don't even do it using complete thoughts. We just say "bus factor" and everyone understands why one person can't be responsible all the time for something (or in this case, everything).

> Team members didn’t want to speak up and offer their own ideas because he always berated them for it.

Holy shit, you didn't torch his ass for berating people in meetings? Are there even managers at this company?

This, to me, is the worst failure. Either management is ignorant of the berating (bad) or they silently tolerated it (even worse).

I really hope the managers at that company are taking a long hard look in the mirror and doing a post-mortem on what went wrong with Rick. I suspect they're not, and attributing it to one bad employee, but I can hope.

There is always two parties involved, the player and the fiddle. The assumption that the developer was sucked empty and thrown away is the OPs alone, the article referred to does not provide details of attempts at intervention.

> "He refused to take time off or allow any work to be delegated. He also repeatedly rejected attempts to introduce free open source frameworks to replace hard-to-maintain bespoke tools."

Why did he have the authority in either of those last two decisions?

> "I agree that the situation that came about was also his manager’s fault. "

And his manager's manager, and basically anyone who was aware of this project and the fact that it was delayed by two years.

Nobody above Rick's manager was looking into this project when it was delayed by two years? Nobody took a look at the JIRA/whatever board and saw that one person was blocking everyone despite working 100 hours a week?