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

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

#21

Post by rjzzleep »

Sevrene wrote: post #14

While I can agree there are 'real' rockstar developers that act like the original article mentions, I don't think whether Rick was or wasn't one of them is what matters here. What matters most here is how management dealt with him and their lack of responsibility for Rick's work for the last two years(!) and the end as their result. Other industries seem to get this better than ours. I've worked in quite a few places…

I'm not sure other industries do handle it better.

I would argue that it's a prevalent problem. There has to be a reason, why there are a bunch of studies on success and failure ratios of projects. A lot of them explicitly stating that the top issues are bad communications, lack of priorities etc.

One of the standard PM exams even has frequent exam question about how sources of conflicts in projects in the following order:

schedules, project priorities, resources, technical opinions, administrative procedures, cost and personality

Personality is always last.

Yes, there are exceptions. There always are, but in general lack of experience at the top gets pushed down the chain. Top performers are always the first to be negatively affected though.

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

#22

Post by korzun »

I briefed the original story, and one thing that stood out to me is that the author threw a 'bomb' named collaboration into the mix AFTER firing so-called Rick.

What author fails to understand, is that the problem could have been addressed by collaboration as well.

I caught a 'scrum-master' CTO wanna-be that wrote an article about (omitting my name) how he is happy I was gone because I was hard to manage. This guy showed up and hanged his scrum-master certificate on the wall and promoted a (fresh out of college) junior developer to management because he was there for a year longer than me and proceeded to enable and reward the most idiotic technical decisions I have ever seen while the rest of us was battling scalability problems.

He never talked to me; he was in the room with his new director of engineering (1 year of non-management experience, seriously) trying to come up with a strategy on how to do things and then try to run with it without getting any feedback.

Obviously, I shot them down, and it got to the point where they would come up with this stuff (no communication) and could not provide any details (why will this work? why is it better?).

I simply quit and never looked back at that point, they probably did collaborate a lot more. And by collaboration, I mean circle jerk whatever ideas sound great and force them on junior developers that do not know any better.

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

#23

Post by kahlonel »

If you are a CTO or manager, please do your developers a favor by not throwing buzzwords at them in 99% of your conversations that you don't even understand. As a consequence of your vague requirements, if a developer chose to implement something that you don't quite agree with, grow a pair and suggest an alternative.

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

#26

Post by mikl »

Great write-up. If your software team has a single point of failure, a linchpin developer that holds everything together, then your team is defective. Regardless of the attributes of this developer, management has failed in letting it come so far.

I have quit jobs for far less severe cases of this. Feeling like you can’t take time off and that the project will fail if you do not save it, is not healthy. If you find yourself in that situation, you need to seriously consider why your team is broken, and if its not your fault, quit. Find a job where you have colleagues that you can rely on to shoulder their part of the work.

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

#27

Post by jsjohnst »

cupscale wrote: post #10
pault wrote: post #3

From a comment on the original post: "Unfortunately Rick rejected months of overtures by leadership. 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. Including the security framework as you mentioned." Also: "Another poster blamed management. I agree that the situation that came about…

This still reeks of CYA. > "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 awar…

Two years past a committed delivery date is a very long time in software terms and is a sign heads need to roll all over the organization.

I think an argument could be made for everyone in Rick’s chain up to and potentially including the CEO should be let go.

> I’d been aware of the project for a while, because it had grown infamous in my organization, but hadn’t been assigned to it.

And especially the blog post writer who knew about the problem for a long time self admittedly and did nothing about it, only to then pat himself on the back for handling the situation poorly when it was finally assigned to him.

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

#28

Post by coldtea »

le-mark wrote: post #7

There were a lot of failures in the Rick story "on all sides" as POTUS would say. This author seems to identify with Rick and frames this type of developer as gifted, but taken advantage of. At the end of the day, we all have to manage our own careers. And in this field that especially includes "managing your manager". Whatever process you find yourself in, you have to be able to push back and say: "I'm working on X,…

>There were a lot of failures in the Rick story "on all sides" as POTUS would say.

Nope, there weren't. That's what management is for. Everything that happened, since they didn't attempt any change, is their fault and their only.

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

#29

Post by coldtea »

cupscale wrote: post #6

Yeah, wow. 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 tha…

>I mean, Rick's a dick, no doubt.

"No doubt" a real person is a dick, because of a single-sourced account from those who fired him, which even at that, leaves the question of their own failures wide open?

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