You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by mercer » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 3:50 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #60

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 di…

Plus, the people you work with and for might start their own company and offer you work, take you on as a well-paid freelancer, etc. Business is not all business.

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

#92

Post by volkk » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 3:50 PM UTC

cupscale wrote: post #79

dx034 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving someone more tasks than anyone could handle and then firing that person because they don't achieve it is only management's failure. He didn't need to be "removed", he only needed to be managed properly.

Did you read the original article? That wasn’t the crux of why they fired him.

You're missing the point. The way it all happened was essentially "yeah so we beat the guy with a baseball bat and he had the nerve to swing back at us while we did so"

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

#93

Post by dpark » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 3:55 PM UTC

corobo wrote: post #90

dpark wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was mocking the original: “Look at my story! I’m going to use pop culture character names and memes and shit to identify with my audience! Whee!”

Once would have been enough. Twice to make a point. But then the point's made.

Shrug

Tastes vary.

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

#94

Post by mercer » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 3:58 PM UTC

thisisit wrote: post #9

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…

Personally I think those are important enough points to be included in the main post. People shouldn't need to dig through the comments to see those. But these statements came ex-post and that too when people pointed out obvious holes in the original post. So these sound like the original writer was coming up with excuses to absolve the company of wrongdoing. Oh..you mean vacation..yea sure we did that.....you mean m…

I can imagine the writer not intentionally hiding these things, but I do agree that they should be added to the original article.

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

#95

Post by oandrei » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 4:00 PM UTC

Right, because computer programming (unlike computer science!) does not take a genius. It is, basically, a routine work. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to say the same about fundamental science, for example here: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... and here : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/30/we-hai... This worries me. Without outstanding contributions from individuals, science will turn into waste of human resources. We absolutely need to protect and care about our elites !

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

#96

Post by Sevrene » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 4:01 PM UTC

noxToken wrote: post #51

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 gran…

Working overtime without some sort of commiseration should be illegal, yet it is typically expected in a lot of salaried work. Even my local groceries makes their workers spend 10 minutes cleaning up before close, 'off the clock'. Game studios are notorious for the crunch at the end of a projects life cycle because of the random off the cuff date a publisher needs to fill up a void in their yearly lineup or quarter.

The thing is they don't explicitly say 'work over time' they say 'this feature needs to be complete and working by Monday or else' What does management think the developer will do, pull it out of our behind? Reminds me of Steve Jobs, actually.

I once had my boss explain to me if these features don't get completed before the end of the month, he will lose his house. I had already previously told him that it's impossible and had to explain we will need to compromise to reach that date. We released 1 month late but the software has a lot of issues and I'm now blamed for this as the lead developer of only two programmers. I worked 12 hour days 6 days a week for 1 month and he wanted me to work more. He still has his house.

It's a zero sum game. Developers only have so much time in a week and the more you chip at sleep and rest/play time, the more it's going to cost the developer's health and the project's cost.

It's frustrating because I'm just a developer (mostly contractor to boot) and yet I feel like I have valuable constructive criticism that would benefit management and the productivity of the project on the whole if they adapted it. You can rarely pull that off tastefully. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe these things exist for a good reason and I'm seeing this differently because I'm not in management so I have some confirmation bias. That's possible, but I've experienced the exact same scenario as you and it always seems harmful for the developer and harmful for the project.

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

#97

Post by cupscale » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

volkk wrote: post #92

cupscale wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the original article? That wasn’t the crux of why they fired him.

You're missing the point. The way it all happened was essentially "yeah so we beat the guy with a baseball bat and he had the nerve to swing back at us while we did so"

Eh, no it’s not like that at all.

Again this is more like a dog that’s been abused over the years and then mauls a kid.

No ones surprised that the dog is aggressive, and the owners are obviously guilty of abusing an animal - a horrible thing for the owners to have done.

That doesn’t change that the dog’s aggressive now, though, and should be put down.

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

#98

Post by Sevrene » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 4:08 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #81

rjzzleep wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personality is not a thing as such. What matter is the environment. People adapt to their environment. Most character issues are a response to the work environment.

I'm not sure I follow, maybe I'm not understanding you correctly. Are you actually saying personality is only a result of environment?

Take for instance introverts vs extraverts. Introverts might be forced to be more social in an open office, but they would still work better in a private space and management has the ability prioritise their worker's personality and provide both open and private spaces for them.

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

#99

Post by thisisit » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #94

thisisit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think those are important enough points to be included in the main post. People shouldn't need to dig through the comments to see those. But these statements came ex-post and that too when people pointed out obvious holes in the original post. So these sound like the original writer was coming up with excuses to absolve the company of wrongdoing. Oh..you mean vacation..yea sure we did that.....you mean m…

I can imagine the writer not intentionally hiding these things, but I do agree that they should be added to the original article.

I am not too sure because if I want to make noise about how my developer screwed up, highlighting the incompetence of the direct manager played a big part as well. Yea sure maybe the minute detail of management overtures being refused can be missed because they wanted to portray themselves as a good guy.

From the looks of it the whole thing was written from "an expose on star developer culture" point of view. In which case, admitting your own mistakes in the first draft takes backseat and it's all about the "star developer".

What is even more surprising is given that so many people have pointed out this hole, there hasn't been an edit to clarify this point. I am not digital content expert but if it does spread wide, no one is going to care what is in the comments.

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

#100

Post by imron » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 4:23 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #67

imron wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.)

> The problem here is that "good managers" are incredibly thin on the ground

The problem in this case was really caused by a bad manager though - who ended up being fired. That didn't make it in to the original story and was only noted by the author in the comments.

Where was the exposé on the mistakes made by management, which seem to be equally egregious? I mean you don't even have to be an exceptional manager to prevent this sort of problem, just a competent one.