Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 175 posts

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

#51

Post by noxToken »

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…

> Don't get me started on the arbitrarily shifting release dates that correlate with buggy releases that we developers get angry emails about.

I'm willing to bet that it likely causation in a majority of cases. I've been there. Business comes back with a list of wishes for the quarter. We're asked about the features as a whole, and I'm already on the fence about whether it can actually get done.

We start getting granular with the stories. By the end of the first sprint's estimations, we've definitively said, "There is no way we can finish all of these by the end of the quarter." That's taken back to upper management, and the whip is cracked. Too bad.

Sprint has started, and instead of a quarterly wish list, we now have hard, immobile release dates for different feature sets that don't give enough time. Some people are working long hours, and some of use are sticking to our 40 and done. The features are released as wished. The production defect count increases, and the production team grumbles.

I assume we'll repeat this until the clients get sick of shoddy workmanship and outages.

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

#52

Post by falcolas »

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.

Who, when being worked 12x7, and when given the pressure of being a blocker of everybody else, isn't going to respond poorly? I've seen some of the nicest and even tempered people get short with others when the pressure cooker is really turned up. Rick sounds like he was a good guy to begin with - someone who regularly helped his coworkers, someone his coworkers trusted - until he was overloaded with work.

Fight or flight. When exposed to extreme stressers, people tend to take one of those two paths. Rick took the first. Someone else would have broken down balling, or spiraled into deep depression, or isolated themselves. Don't blame them for being human - blame the company for creating such a terrible environment.

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

#53

Post by cupscale »

falcolas wrote: post #49
cupscale wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reasons for being an asshole don’t change the end result though. It just changes the context around it. Similarly I can understand how an aggressive dog came to be (poor training, etc.). That won’t change my opinion that the dog should be put down when it mauls a kid, you know?

Perhaps it's the dog's owners who should be put down. After all, they'll just get another dog and make it as aggressive as the previous one... Blaming an innocent for how they were cultivated is silly. Especially when those innocents can be rehabilitated. We're getting a little off topic, but this company is just setting up another Rick to take the blame when the train goes off the tracks again.

If you read my other comments, you’ll see that I agree with you completely.

That doesn’t mean the dog shouldn’t be put down. It just means there are also other parties at fault.

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

#54

Post by [deleted] »

drawkbox wrote: post #20

There are quite a few places like this out there, typically technology has a muted role in decisions in these organizations, quality takes a backseat for the crunch for the next meeting demo, ad infinitum. A smell of these types of places is they always blame the developers that just left, almost like a scapegoat or two minutes of hate rally. Another smell is estimation is rarely respected i.e. if you say it will tak…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by scarface74 »

coldtea wrote: post #28
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.

You are responsible for your own career though. By being the one subject matter expert and not doing documentation, it meant that he would probably never be put on new projects using new technologies and probably his own technical skills became outdated. So when he did get fired, he found it harder to find another job (been there done that - didn’t get fired but came close).

So it doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is, he was the one ultimately harmed by it.

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

#57

Post by cupscale »

falcolas wrote: post #52
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. Who, when being worked 12x7, and when given the pressure of being a blocker of everybody else, isn't going to respond poorly? I've seen some of the nicest and even tempered people get short with others when the pressure cooker is really turned up. Rick sounds like he was a good guy to begin with - someone who regularly helped his coworkers, someone his coworkers trusted - until he w…

None of that changes the fact that Rick became an awful co-worker and needed to be removed, whether temporarily or more permanently. Sorry, berating your co-workers repeatedly is a terminable offense in many places.

To go back to my analogy: Frankenstein’s monster still killed a bunch of people at the end of the day, even if it was Frankenstein’s fault that the monster existed at all.

We can blame Frankenstein while still agreeing that his monster should’ve faced consequences for its actions.

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

#58

Post by scarface74 »

falcolas wrote: post #48
marktangotango wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naw, at the very least Rick was guilty of hubris and naïveté. I came in after a Rick left once, that guys ignorance and poor decisions hobbled that company for years. Icarus is not held in high regard, by anyone.

Yes. How dare Rick be human; to be missing traits which are typically obtained by teaching, not by osmosis. The story of Icarus is, one, completely fictional, and two, a parable used for teaching such traits.

If you are in technology, either you become responsible for learning on your own or you get left behind.

I’m not just referring to learning the latest new and shiny JavaScript Framework. I learned the hard way that technical skills will only take you so far. I had to learn the soft skills.

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

#60

Post by scarface74 »

snarfy wrote: post #43

You don't get what you deserve. You get what you get. There is a misconception that if you do the extra work you will get compensated some way either through promotion or bonus. It's simply not true. You are paid for the position you were hired for. Rick should have left the moment he took on more work without matching compensation. Why wouldn't the business pile more work on Rick? It's free. As soon as it costs mone…

There is a misconception that if you do the extra work you will get compensated some way either through promotion or bonus. It's simply not true. You are paid for the position you were hired for.

I agree on the surface. But I would add that extra work may not get you a promotion or more compensation at the company you are at now but the right kind of extra work where you are learning new skills or can say that you did a project that was important does help your resume and can make you more money somewhere else.

Post reply on HN