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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

#61

Post by thestephen »

We re-released the product to this group. It consisted of 10% of Rick’s original code which was pretty stable. It also had a few thousand lines of new code to replace about 150,000 lines of incomprehensible mess. The team had replaced five years of work in about six months. Over the next few months we expanded from pilot to full customer release.

Up next: Manager on Medium bragging that he or she would be able to type out all ~1 000 000 words in the Harry Potter series in a couple hundred hours.

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

#62

Post by scarface74 »

Shivetya wrote: post #31

likely Rick never could off load his work because of management. he may have been up against a wall of resistance where no one else did anymore than they had too. this is how you get Ricks. You have a general apathy among many of the developers which sets in because they don't see anyone held accountable so why should they exert the effort?

There are always choices — either change your environment or change your environment.

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

#63

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

provost wrote: post #2

A very similar scenario is described in the fictional work, "The Phoenix Project", is it not? There is a smart character who handles every escalation, but nothing is documented, he was the bottleneck, and his stress level was high. 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…

Can I ask what you're hoping to get out of a book?

You already seem aware of and thoughtful about the issue. (To the point you could identify a similar one in fiction.)

I'm always loathe to recommend books about techniques -- almost invariably, they're used in a process-as-proxy way. (If I had one piece of advice of managers, it would be that -- don't manage by proxy!)

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

#64

Post by forgottenpass »

cupscale wrote: post #32
coldtea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Ehhh sorry, saying things like "I'm Albert Einstein and you're all just fucking monkeys scratching in the dirt" doesn't strike me as the speech of someone who's particularly nice. Most people (at least in my experience, you know, the one who's making the subjective judgement about him being a dick) can be angry without saying something pretentiously mean like that. It's ok for the conclusion here to be, "Rick's an as…

Most people (at least in my experience, you know, the one who's making the subjective judgement about him being a dick) can be angry without saying something pretentiously mean like that.

Doesn't matter.

Someone backed into a corner is just act like someone backed into a corner. The die was already cast. Everything that happens after is blame-shifting.

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

#66

Post by candiodari »

perpetualcrayon wrote: post #30

IMO, the most amazing quote from the original story: It also had a few thousand lines of new code to replace about 150,000 lines of incomprehensible mess. No one looked at the quality of work after maybe 10,000 lines of code?

You haven't yet seen many SWEs decide on whether to do a rewrite yet have you ?

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

#67

Post by zimpenfish »

imron wrote: post #16
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…

> "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." How late in the game was this though? It should have been really clear cut: Rick: I'm going to take on this extra work…

> A good manager would have nipped this in the bud before it started.

The problem here is that "good managers" are incredibly thin on the ground and even then, this situation can arise due to circumstances beyond their control (consider a politically well-connected developer, for example.)

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

#68

Post by dpark »

perpetualcrayon wrote: post #30

IMO, the most amazing quote from the original story: It also had a few thousand lines of new code to replace about 150,000 lines of incomprehensible mess. No one looked at the quality of work after maybe 10,000 lines of code?

These claims make me assume the original author exaggerated everything to the point that the whole story is essentially a lie. This guy was incredibly capable but copy-pasted everywhere and wrote shitty code? This doesn’t even make sense. It makes even less sense that somehow no one noticed his copy-paste coding for over two years until he was finally fired for other reasons. But then those same incompetents who didn’t notice the copy-pasting or generally overengineered spagetti code suddenly came together to rebuild the whole product in a quarter of the time with less than a tenth of the code.

Yeah right.

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

#69

Post by zimpenfish »

Shivetya wrote: post #31

likely Rick never could off load his work because of management. he may have been up against a wall of resistance where no one else did anymore than they had too. this is how you get Ricks. You have a general apathy among many of the developers which sets in because they don't see anyone held accountable so why should they exert the effort?

> likely Rick never could off load his work because of management.

It's possible. But it's also possible that he considered everyone else far below his acceptable level of skill and refused to delegate or allow other people's code into "his" codebase, even going as far as to ignore a team-blocking ticket for months until someone else picks it up, then blocks on the review, then when management finally say "get on this", rewrites it himself and commits his own code without review.

What? No, I'm not bitter about recent experiences. Not at all.

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

#70

Post by sumeno »

provost wrote: post #2

A very similar scenario is described in the fictional work, "The Phoenix Project", is it not? There is a smart character who handles every escalation, but nothing is documented, he was the bottleneck, and his stress level was high. 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…

When I was reading "The Phoenix Project" I thought that the outcome there was going to be the same as in the original article this post is responding to. The "hotshot" developer would be fired and everyone would live happily ever after without addressing the reason things got so bad.

I was pleasantly surprised when they acknowledged this is largely a management issue and worked to fix the underlying causes instead of using the developer as a scapegoat.

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