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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
by cupscale 9y ago
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 that I see new or overly passive managers make. How do you expect one person not to have all of your domain knowledge if they're solving all of the challenging problems?
Fixing this doesn't even involve being super confrontational:
"I'll fix <database issue 123>."
"Hey, Rick, you're already working on XYZ and I want Summer to get some experience working with our database system, so I'd like for her to do it."
> First, he created a cult of dependence.
Because management idly sat by and let him do that. People want to feel irreplaceable and like they're exceptional. One way to do that is to create this cult of dependence. Management's job is to step in and re-assure Rick that he's a valued member of the team while also directly confronting this cult of dependence.
We do this all the time at my job, and we don't even do it using complete thoughts. We just say "bus factor" and everyone understands why one person can't be responsible all the time for something (or in this case, everything).
> Team members didn’t want to speak up and offer their own ideas because he always berated them for it.
Holy shit, you didn't torch his ass for berating people in meetings? Are there even managers at this company?
This, to me, is the worst failure. Either management is ignorant of the berating (bad) or they silently tolerated it (even worse).
I really hope the managers at that company are taking a long hard look in the mirror and doing a post-mortem on what went wrong with Rick. I suspect they're not, and attributing it to one bad employee, but I can hope.
- pault 9y agoThey responded to these points in a comment on the original article, which acknowledged management's responsibility for creating the problem, and they say they fired his manager first.
- cupscale 9y agoI'll admit that I'm particularly touchy about bad people managers, but it really does seem like they just washed their hands of the problem without trying to really discern: * Why this became such a big problem (and wasn't resolved earlier) * How to prevent it from happening in the future Because if one team can effectively silo themselves so well that problems like Rick are allowed to fester for multiple years, I don't have high hopes for the future for them.
- coldtea 9y ago>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?
- cupscale 9y agoEhhh 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 asshole who should've been fired but management fucked up pretty badly." Situations don't have to be binary with only one party at fault. EDIT: Let's also not forget the accounts of Rick supposedly berating people in meetings. If multiple people think you're being mean to them, you're probably being mean.
- bartread 9y agoI don't know: in my experience pretty much everyone has a breaking point somewhere and once they reach it things can get pretty random. I've seen people I thought had it all together just completely lose the plot and disintegrate too many times to believe it's all bubbling away there, just below the surface, in all of us.
- cupscale 9y agoYour 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?
- falcolas 9y agoPerhaps 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.
- oceanswave 9y agoIs he, really? Seems like the most dedicated employee mentioned in the article. Could his devotion be tempered by management and molded into a better hammer for the company? Sure seems like it. Seems like Rick was well respected to be placed so much responsibility - the real dicks here are the ones who led to his decline without intervention.
- cupscale 9y agoEr, yeah, he is. You can be devoted, respected, and admired but still be an asshole. They’re not mutually exclusive traits. See also: Steve Jobs, famously.
- falcolas 9y ago> 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.
- cupscale 9y agoNone 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.
- dx034 9y agoGiving 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.