>But, two years later, Jamie was “that guy”. You know, the one who wants to code without being bothered. >I should have noticed the signs. He didn’t speak up i

>But, two years later, Jamie was “that guy”. You know, the one who wants to code without being bothered. >I should have noticed the signs. He didn’t speak up in retrospectives, he didn’t contribute process or product ideas like I expected, and his “team-friendly” interactions were usually sarcastic. He often talked about technical debt, our lack of innovation, and the “stupid” decisions holding us back. I suspect if you just gave Jamie free reign to spend most (not all, just most) of his time refactoring the code base and fixing up the dev tooling while other people worked on bugs and features then Jamie would be happier, the code base would be less buggy and the other developers would get their features done quicker. The fact that Jamie is quite grumpy about all of this suggests that the code quality and tooling at this company is poor and he isn't being allowed to fix the things that are causing him pain. And maybe he doesn't want to meet customers? Is it so bad if that task is left to somebody who likes doing it? >His enthusiasm for changing the world is replaced with nit-picking the development process. >Worse of all, though, his concern that “We aren’t building the right thing” will be replaced with “We aren’t building the thing right.” This attitude absolutely floors me. You absolutely want a diversity of attitudes and skills on any team and that includes having some people who worry more about building the right thing and other people who worry more about building the thing right. Those are complementary attitudes that usually go with complementary skillsets.