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

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

#121

Post by codesternews » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 5:22 PM UTC

I disagree with some of below comments and it is totally Managment fault.

I might be somewhat a little rick. But in my case it is the managment responsibility to set the expectation.

If a task takes 5 days to complete but your manager says I need build at the end of day. You can not deny it and you have no other option but to patch.

Let's assume another scenario. If your manager says he needs build at the end of day and you are spending 5 days to just write the beautiful thoughtful code than what will happen. You loose your creadibility and no one will trust you and say you are rockstar.

Then you will be fired like dumb.

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

#122

Post by philipov » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 5:28 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #118

cupscale wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correction: A dog that's been abused for years by a kid and then mauls the kid while he is himself beating the dog

And then the kid goes on to write an essay about how good he was for finally putting down the dirty beast.

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

#123

Post by b_t_s » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 5:30 PM UTC

cupscale wrote: post #105

Mithaldu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sheer depth of badness this comparison reaches is extremely impressive. Developers are human. They don't need to be put down.

No, but sometimes they need to be fired because the work situation is unrecoverable. Regardless of who’s fault it is. “Put down” here is an analogy for being fired. I don’t actually think Rick should be put down. I’d hoped that was obvious.

"fired" is a very negative word, but the point is there needs to be a break between company and employee. As someone who was fired for cause in a situation like this, it's the best thing that ever happened to me. The ship was on fire and sinking fast, and I was totally burned out, bailing as fast as I could. Requested my vacation time once we shipped(nearly on schedule) & got fired instead. Felt awful at the time and I was totally bitter, but looking back it was a godsend. 5 weeks later I had a new job, a vacation, and a huge raise. Now I can't imagine why I spent so long there doing miserable work with old dead end tech, crazy overtime, and all for a pittance. Yea it would have been nice to leave on my terms but the important thing was leaving, regardless of fault or method

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

#124

Post by watwut » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 5:42 PM UTC

What I find symptomatic is that everyone takes Rick being the superior genius as granted - while there is little evidence of his real superiority. In most likelihood, he was slightly more experienced then the rest of the team and knew slightly more at the beginning. The evidence of them being actually capable is there in the subsequent work. Which was better then Ricks, but note how they don't get to be praised for skill at all. Only Rick is.

The pattern I have seen multiple times in IT companies is that if you act the way Rick is described to act, you will create aura of geniality around you. If you are the slightly more experienced and a lot more confident, you rejecting other peoples ideas or criticizing their work will be unconditionally accepted as truth. And once aura is there, it is also pretty easy to frame every difference of opinion as objective truth that they are wrong.That gives others little chance in politics.

Describing experience: it does not matter that those slightly less experienced needed maybe two-three months to get up to speed, it does not matter that what they proposed was actually equally valid solution to the problem at hand. It does not matter that Rick saving day from someone else bad solution was may Rick rewriting equally valid code to another equally valid code.

What happens is that Rick acted arrogant and therefore everyone in leadership and in comments assumes he was the biggest rock star there was in the company. Other people cooperated well, therefore they are clearly less skilled than Rick was.

As for working 12 hours a day 7 days a week - it is irrational and invariably leads to inferior results. However a person who has discipline to go home, sleep, exercise, take rest, say no will not be praised as a role model, despite making better more rational decisions. Nope, the one who does irrational decisions is fallen genius hero.

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

#125

Post by watwut » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 5:46 PM UTC

codesternews wrote: post #121

I disagree with some of below comments and it is totally Managment fault. I might be somewhat a little rick. But in my case it is the managment responsibility to set the expectation. If a task takes 5 days to complete but your manager says I need build at the end of day. You can not deny it and you have no other option but to patch. Let's assume another scenario. If your manager says he needs build at the end of day…

It sounds like only Rick worked that much. While there is management to take part of the blame, I have seen multiple times developers working that much because they wanted to. Sometimes they thought it "must be that way", other times they wanted to pretend they are heroes to save the day and did things that could easily wait. Yet other times, they had no life out of work or messy life and this allowed them to pretend it is not the case.

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

#126

Post by fortythirteen » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 5:54 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #71

scarface74 wrote: post #37

I see so many sides to this -I’ve been a Rick, stayed at a company for nine years, knew where the bodies were buried because I buried most of them myself and became more disenchanted year after year which caused my attitude to get worse and worse. They wouldn’t fire me but they also wouldn’t promote me and give me raises - causing a horrible cycle. I woke up one day 8 years later in 2008 and making only 10,000 more t…

When I read the original article I was immediately curious how Rick would've written about this, and whether he was really as bad as he sounded, because I also have been, at least, a semi-Rick. Or at least I can imagine someone writing about me in a way similar to this. There's a lot I could say about my experience, but it boils down to a combination of bad practices/behavior on both sides (that I learned from immens…

Having an entire product rest on your shoulders sucks and emotionally drains you rather quickly. In my case it was a startup with a technology I created on the side that became the main business and eventually became the sole earner for a company whose other business had already been dwindling.

At the time there were maybe half a dozen people in the country that even worked in this particular niche. If I left the company it would likely go down, and the CEO kept telling me how many people would lose work if I left. And the pressure and responsibility kept growing and growing. And the sales people, who made up half of the staff, kept getting more and more antagonistic, as I couldn't meet their constantly larger expectations, which were often technically impossible (like sci-fi movie level). This situation lasted for over a year, culminating in a huge blowout between the CEO and I when I left.

I became a Rick real fast. I still feel like shit for being a Rick, and it's taken years for me to move that experience out of my "work baggage".

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

#127

Post by watwut » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 5:57 PM UTC

korzun wrote: post #22

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 sh…

Except that, in this case, project continued more successfully without Rick then it did with his unofficial leadership.

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

#128

Post by scaryclam » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 6:08 PM UTC

noxToken wrote: post #83

user5994461 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick question, what does your contract say about work hours? There is usually a well defined limit and the unpaid overtime you do should be regarded as illegal. Don't put all the blames on management when developers do long hours. It's the developers who decide to stay late all the time when they should not.

A lot of us are contractors for the company with 40 hour work weeks. People at my company are salaried. I don't know about the other companies. I don't stray much from my 40 hours. If others want to put in that time, so be it. I always tell them to knock it off, but some people just can't be helped. I don't put it all on management. It's a little of column A and a little of column B. It's tough standing up to managem…

I wonder what would happen if a company had overtime pay for developers. I'd be willing to put money on working hours getting reduced to something sane and deadlines pushed back to accommodate it.

Maybe one day I'll suggest a trial for it at my company ;)

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

#129

Post by syshax » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 6:09 PM UTC

pascalxus wrote: post #109

Documentation, while important is also a bit overrated in it's capabilities. Don't get me wrong - It would be lovely if you could simply read a bit of documentation to understand what's going on in the code. Reality is different. The details of understanding code, is in the code itself and how it connects to all the other bits of code. The original author of the code has an understanding that far exceeds the explanat…

I wish more people understood this.

There is no excuse to not have any documentation. One must always make an attempt to write a reasonable amount of documentation so there isn't a situation where there is no hope to understand anything except read all the source code.

But a lot of people (managerial types especially) expect docs will be "step 1 look here, step 2 look there, step 3 fix with this exact command"

Docs should explain how a system works, and perhaps some important places to look, but it's not a checklist to fix all problems. The consumer must still possess the ability, and will, to investigate and fix problems using their own critical thinking.

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

#130

Post by kazinator » Mon, Oct 16, 2017, 6:09 PM UTC

There are various alternative ways to interpret the story. Like, "Yay, we finally outran one developer by using an entire team, and gutting the requirements." That's like moving the finish line closer without telling the forerunner.

Hey, only 5% of the users need this; let's remove it? What's 5%.

You know, that could be sometimes justified, but not always. Could we throw something out of Firefox or MS Word that only 5% of the users use?

It's not clear whether Rick himself invented all those additional requirements himself, or whether they were external.

Could it be that the man toiled earnestly to implement requirements coming at him from various people such as product managers and such? And then they crucified him for the software being too complicated due to doing things which the current political party suddenly finds unnecessary.