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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

#161

Post by watwut »

Andaith wrote: post #154
watwut wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not entirely sure that's true. I have no evidence, I just don't think any company would have a blog post "We had staffing problems, now we're buggered". Instead it's "We had staffing problems, we fixed them, now everything is amazing". I also don't think things would have gotten this bad if the original dev team could have picked up more of the slack, but I don't have experience in dysfunctional workplaces. Still…

They failed at fighting Rick, they failed at politics and they quite clearly are not ready to be leaders. They did not failed at programming once the above was solved by new leader.

Yeah, because that framing is imo wrong too.

1.) In all likelihood, they Rick was not that much genius, although he might have some more more knowledge initially and probably was not bad programmer either. There is nothing to show he was genius.

Here I will make the guess: Rick belittled other people and criticized everything they did and simultaneously had more initial knowledge. That made everyone assume Rick is genius and others are low skilled. The politics follow from there. Note that other people did not slacked at work nor took three hours long lunches (I assume). Them working overtime would fix nothing.

Local praised genius belittling other employees has predictable consequences - it is that others look significantly less skilled then they are to management (yeah management is to blame too) and those people know it. It also means those people will learn to not have ideas and not have initiative, because they get insulted for those and because those invariably turn against them. As I told, it is very predictable.

2.) The other people did not turned from people who are learned to be passive to people who suddenly got agency and autonomy. Nothing in their programming skills changed, only people management of leadership of company changed.

And note how them not being arrogant still means they get comparably very little credit for technical talent or skill. (I see that as pattern in it.)

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

#162

Post by zimpenfish »

imron wrote: post #100
zimpenfish wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

Even competent managers can be comprehensively stymied by a politically connected and savvy developer.

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

#164

Post by internetman55 »

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…

Wow, that exactly describes my company.

Our group ignores the ops stuff necessary to keep our product up and running to keep pushing out garbage for the next big demo. Most of our product is not working multiple days out of the month.

Some MBA guy with ambition learned enough technical skills to keep things up and running with some help from me.

Boss goes to MBA guy to keep things up and running and considers the problem "solved". MBA guy is running himself ragged by logging on after hours and screwing around with data files just to keep things running, then doing the same admin BS all day.

After MBA guy is let go, he is badmouthed for coming up with an unsustainable solution. All future admin work is explained as being necessary only because of him.

Eventually we had our "launch" and our PM did the "big presentation" to our company leadership. After everyone started to realize our product was garbage and we had boatloads of promises we could never keep, she just jumped ship.

I would have considered the whole thing a joke except it ruined my health and relationships for several months.

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

#165

Post by internetman55 »

Sevrene wrote: post #96
noxToken wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

I'm new in this industry, but based on my life, the experience of some close friends, and anecdotes like this, my impression is that you need enough career security and cash savings that you can just ignore stupid requests from your boss and not care about the fallout. Of course that is probably unsustainable outside of entry level jobs, so I am sort of convinced that I should have a 6-10 year plan to exit it

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

#166

Post by scarface74 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #157
scarface74 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is also another option, you genuinely like your work. For some reason, the team does not want to get involved and the management fails to notice this. Fixing the mess means either stepping up as a manager, or leaving. In both cases, you lost the work you liked. What do you do?

What is there to like about a job with bad management and bad team dynamics?

I also learned the hard way the cost of staying at a job for too long because I got comfortable - or at least was more comfortable with the devil I knew.

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

#167

Post by internetman55 »

As someone new in this industry, I'm noticing that whoever appears more normal in meetings instantly wins any conflict, regardless of who has the most valid arguments. I find myself preemptively doing as little work as possible on days I think I'll have some sort of discussion in a meeting, since being frazzled from writing code ensures that the other party can force their demands on you without issue. It seems like people are also throwing out little jabs constantly. If you are in a relaxed state of mind, you win and they look weak. If you are worked up and respond, they win. Basically I writing code seems like a horrific waste of time on most days.

Is this normal?

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

#168

Post by sage76 »

cannonedhamster wrote: post #142
sage76 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever process you find yourself in, you have to be able to push back and say: "I'm working on X, if you want me to work on Y, what do you want first? What's the priority?" I asked an ex-manager that once when I had 2 important issues to deal with. His response : "They're both important dude, get going on them." I don't know how to respond to that. Assholes will be assholes I suppose.

The way to respond to that is to say that time and resources are limited, he can choose which one he would like to prioritize. If he doesn't say you will pick one to work on and begin on the other afterward. If he doesn't like the one you worked on first, he should have chosen differently. You can physically only work on one thing at a time. They choose or you choose. You have the power.

> If he doesn't like the one you worked on first, he should have chosen differently.

And that, gives him power to fuck me over in my reviews if he doesn't like me. Logic didn't work on these assholes. I was told point blank in a conversation, "In this company, perception is reality.". So if someone "thinks" you were wrong, you were. Facts were not something people cared about.

If you are aware of the Gervais principle, this is a classic "heads I win, tails you lose" scenario. He covered his ass, and if things went wrong, fingers would be pointed at me.

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

#169

Post by tonyarkles »

bartread wrote: post #39
tonyarkles wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, very similar scenario in The Phoenix Project. And thank you for the reminder of that. It occurred to me reading the original article and this reply to it that I may be somewhat putting myself in a Rick situation right now. I don't have any good book recommendations, but I'd be delighted if anyone else did :)

I can sympathise. I've basically been brought in to take over from someone who was the technical bottleneck for the company I now work for so that he can get on with being CTO. For a while I was necessarily working alone, but now I've hired a team and am in the process of eliminating myself as the bottleneck: by the time I go on holiday at the end of this week I want to be off the critical path and never find myself…

Are you me? :)

That's probably the solution: find at least one other person for this team. The CTO was amazingly taking care of all of the infrastructure himself, I came in to lighten his load, and I feel like we could use another person or two to bring it down to a manageable level.

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

#170

Post by falcolas »

cupscale wrote: post #53
falcolas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It absolutely means the dog shouldn't be put down. Dogs, and more importantly people, can be rehabilitated.

All it takes is one person in power to care enough to see to that rehabilitation to transform an aggressive "dick" back into a productive team member.

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