We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made

This pretty much happened to me at a project. Coworker was positioned as leader of our project and thought I was a genius and could make her look really good. Starts pushing me really hard to do stuff I had no experience doing really quickly.

Another MBA-type coworker starts drafting me into his own initiatives. They actually were essential to the stuff we did running at all, but apparently no one actually knew that.

I overwork for a while. Eventually I get pretty burnt out and I stop being able to work at a supranormal pace. Coworker/pseudo-PM gets mad and starts badmouthing me to my actual manager. I get butthutt since I'm working 10x harder than anyone else on my project yet I'm being harassed constantly.

Eventually I have enough savings that I stop caring about getting fire. In my mind, management had unreasonable deadlines, so I began to rely on myself to decide what a reasonable level of output was. I start doing about 4 hours of work a day and stop caring about anything beyond my "daily minimum".

I started to get in really good shape, since I'd constantly sneak to the parking lot and do laps or run to the gym when no one was looking. I started returning to my religion and started reflecting a lot, and really meditating on the situation. I realized that I was being punished for my pride and arrogance and became a much more humble person.

Instead of working hard on my own work to glorify myself, I would focus on making my team members as helpful as possible. Since I was fine losing my job, I was also fine jumping on basically any metaphorical grenade for any reason and absorbing political fallout.

Eventually my entire team was absolutely in love with me, except my pseudo-PM, the MBA coworker, and my actual manager. I realize they are all just stressed out folks trying to make a living. The Pseudo-PM seems mad at me for some reason, and constantly complains about me while the rest of my team talks about me as if I am a saint. Soon pseudo-PM is let go from the company.

Eventually the whole project just gets transfered to another manager, who has reasonable expectations and seems to look out for his employees. Now life is pretty good. It was just a really surreal experience.

Ok, fair, that's good, I think we probably agree more than disagree then.

I guess my take on it is that the handful of Ricks I've seen, they all wanted to position themselves as irreplaceable, as kings of the project. For them it was intentional.

Maybe not the case with the Rick in this story. Without knowing the person (or even if the person is real, or if this is a composite character from multiple situations, etc), we're all just guessing.

I'm just more inclined to sympathize with the author, because of my own experiences with Ricks. :)

Rick seems to have a typical behavior reflecting a “fixed mindset”. This concept is described on the famous book from the psychologist Carol Dweck. He seemed to search for validation all that time. Since the failure would be an atemporal sign that he was not good, he denied the errors. Thankfully, according to the research, eveybody can change from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. We all have some quantum of Rick inside us. I am reading this on a Monday. This is a good text to start the week and reflect about my behavior at my workplace.

Also a 10x Dev would usually go back to the product manager/client and say that feature X looks kind of redundant or a really edge case, but would take a significant chunk of time to code. Is it really needed for v1.0 considering it will cost 2 weeks of Dev Time?

You obviously need to have a good understanding of your clients and their needs and the way they use your product to e able to do that, but many shops simply ignore introducing their developers to the actual users of the product.

> I have been coding for almost 40 years and always been big on documenting code, but the problem is that code changes and documentation doesn’t always keep up.

This has always been a sign for me to tread very, very carefully. People who change code without changing the comments probably didn't read the comments, didn't read the code or didn't understand it - either way, if comment and code disagree both are probably wrong.