10 ms·

Rick. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best-decision-we-ever-made-4c0a99728fde https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-b

Rick. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best-decision-we-ever-made-4c0a99728fde https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best...

crdoconnor 9y ago
>I dove into the source code. Rick was right: no-one could possibly understand what Rick had created. Except for Rick. It was a reflection of the workings of his own mind. Some of it was very clever, a lot of it was copy-pasta, it was all very idiosyncratic, and it was not at all documented. That blog post is embarrassing. They fired an average to poor performer who somehow managed to convince them he was some sort of genius until it became evident that he was not. Either that guy was not their top talent (in which case why did they call him that?) or their other developers are even worse, which is terrifying.
- watwut 9y ago
  He was their top talent, because he did knew more then others in the beginning and had more merit in the beginning. He became untouchable, so any disagreeing collegue got blamed and any criticism of got ignored. It became his way or no way, so everyone else became passive. He ended overworked, but the root problem is not in his tech skills. It was in his social skills, in the inability to cooperate leading to doing it all alone and in the way management enabled all that due to his past performance.
  - bitL 9y ago
    IMO that was a massive management fail. They had a great workhorse doing miracles for them, the guy ended up surrounded by lazy/complacent/incompetent colleagues that just wanted to have good time, he was evidently on the verge of burnout for over a year and then finally fired and blamed for all that was evil in the company. The replacement team of mediocre employees created a very dumbed down version of what they were aiming for and management called it a success. The author of that post should be ashamed of himself they let it go that far due to their complete incompetence. Now reading that HN readers take it as a recipe for their own companies... Oh well.
    - watwut 9y ago
      Negotiating/clarifying requirements is seniors job. Delivering working software instead of something that never seem to be finished and has still bugs is superior leadership. Management aimed at 6 months project. Which got longer due to bugs and mismanaged analysis. Saying that they aimed for something complicated is untrue. They wanted 6 month project and were happy with delivered smaller scope. For that matter, spending a lot of nights in work should not beat "having superior actual results". He did not had results by the end. And he is adult. Managing your own overwork, especially when you have strong negotiation power, is part of what you are expected to do. He failed at that, he was not ready to work independently. Your comment sounds like very willful misreading of original article. There is nothing to suggest that other collegues very lazy or complacent or stupid - zero.
      - bitL 9y ago
        Yes, I agree he should have communicated better and likely his own pride got in the way of suggesting he is overworked. However, management should have never allowed so much strain on a single employee; if one works nights for so long, likely they must have seen his health deteriorating and all kinds of warning signals. That's simply mismanagement at its finest. Ask some top athlete to run marathons every week and see what a shell of a person they become, even if they do that voluntarily. They should have sent him to 2 weeks retreat on Seychelles instead, even forcefully. I inferred lower competence of colleagues from the project they delivered with, as you say, smaller scope. There was also an insightful comment on that article from somebody describing point of view of high performers surrounded by mediocre developers, how they purposefully isolate themselves from dysfunctional teams in order to deliver something and not having their motivation destroyed by complacent teams comprised of people that stopped evolving the moment they got their graduate degrees. As for your next comment, thanks for spotting the author was a "new guy", I confused him with somebody from upper management in that company that was there from the start.
        watwut 9y ago
        You inferred lower skill from them being able to manage scope and from finishing the project within alotated time. Literally. Project planned originally for 6 months took 2 years and still was not delivered and that is somehow proof of superior ability. Much wow. Simple fact is that Ricks approach failed and people he considered less then him succeeded - through they still have to be coupled with someone assertive enough to be manager. Last note: a lot of pointless overtime in this industy is result of celebrating Ricks and calling teams able to manage work schedule lesser. So people.instead of trying to learn how to manage scope and expectations look down on those who are capable to do it.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    >the root problem is not in his tech skills. It doesn't seem to me like there was a root problem. There were several. The primary problems being that he was a bad developer, an asshole and non-cooperative. He wrote idiosyncratic bad code, copy pasta and documented nothing - that wasn't about him being an asshole - that's a lack of basic tech skills. Those are actually the things that led to the company not being able to deliver. I know plenty of perfectly nice junior developers who have done the same thing and if unchecked it causes the same problems they experienced. It doesn't say it, but it's strongly implied that it wasn't just others that had a problem understanding and maintaining his code because of his poor skills - he likely inadvertently made it difficult for himself too.
    - watwut 9y ago
      I hear you, but those failing happen to pretty much everyone who overworks himself too much and don't have feedback. You loose sigh of it, because your brain get it. And you are tired and sleep deprived. Everyone makes mess occasionally and we should not judge people by their worst performance. (Meaning here that he produced both bad and good code). When he did get initial good reputation, he was able to solve problems, he was able to help etc. I think that we should not expect perfection of him nor we need to convince ourselves that he was completely incapable. He was unable to estimate how much time will maintenance of everything take and from there on, he could not win.
clon 9y ago
Mindless over engineering is the hallmark of a mid level engineer - has acquired the technical skills, but not the sense to use them appropriately.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mcnamaratw 9y ago
I'm puzzled that the author doesn't spend some time considering the possibility that Rick might be an idiot. His code was disorganized and possibly way more complex than it needed to be, he had control of his own time but was missing his own ship dates, he was yelling at people ... this isn't necessarily the profile of a genius. The conclusion seems to be "smart people are bad at software" not "Rick wasn't so smart." Maybe it's worth considering both possibilities.
tormeh 9y ago
Rick's not bad, nor is he an asshole (or at least not permanently an asshole). This is what mental illness looks like. I can't say who's to blame for this - the absurd working hours were clearly done willingly - but regardless management could probably have done more to fix the situation. To my mind, Rick needed a forced vacation, a psychologist, and a non-computer related hobby.
- lxg 9y ago
  Unfortunately, I cannot agree here more with you. I had also a "pleasure" working with such Rick. He was our team leader. At the beginning of our collaboration, things were looking quite ok. However, on the surface, he had serious problems with self-management, managing people and controlling. Later, he would preferably work alone in the office, strongly believing that he is surrounded by "idiots". Often he was not respecting others work, neither the requirements nor deadlines posed by higher management, as he "knew better". Without any doubts, he had a great knowledge, was a very skilled and intelligent guy, but, unfortunately, was becoming unbearable to work with. Putting such person in a management position was definitely a good idea, but, as far as I know, at that time he had the needed expertise to set up the crucial processes in the company. In the last months of our collaboration, majority of the projects he was leading were failing - he was not managing with the deadlines neither wanted to delegate tasks. That time, he would also arrive to the office on monday and would leave home on friday evening or saturday, having just a quick chat with his family in the evening. Without proper sleep, always tired and with huge amounts of stress, he was getting into the loop. He always just needed this extra few hours, almost being there. As a small team, we were strongly pushing him to take holidays, to grab some rest. We were also pushing for us taking more responsibility in the projects - we had quite having quite some personal discussions, but without any success (in the end, we are all just humans and even when you're being managed by a "bad" guy, when you see him completely burning out and losing mind, at least you try your best just to help; knowing that there's his wife with two little daughters waiting for the dad coming from work doesn't make this situation easier). In the end, he just "left" the company (not to face being fired) to a new one, leaving so too our team (we were just re-assigned to other teams) and to build a new one in a new place. Our Rick since the beginning had mental issues, which most of colleagues were not aware. At first sight, he was a very intelligent, charismatic and nice guy. However, the ones who had more contact or worked with him could agree that he exhibited behaviours as in typical Asperger syndrome, behaving also quite often schizophrenic. It's a pity that topic of mental health is quite often neglected, as a proper therapy and an early diagnosis, I guess, could help here, him, his family and his future.

Rick. https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best-decision-we-ever-made-4c0a99728fde https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-fired-our-top-talent-best...

crdoconnor 9y ago

>I dove into the source code. Rick was right: no-one could possibly understand what Rick had created. Except for Rick. It was a reflection of the workings of his own mind. Some of it was very clever, a lot of it was copy-pasta, it was all very idiosyncratic, and it was not at all documented. That blog post is embarrassing. They fired an average to poor performer who somehow managed to convince them he was some sort of genius until it became evident that he was not. Either that guy was not their top talent (in which case why did they call him that?) or their other developers are even worse, which is terrifying.

watwut 9y ago
He was their top talent, because he did knew more then others in the beginning and had more merit in the beginning. He became untouchable, so any disagreeing collegue got blamed and any criticism of got ignored. It became his way or no way, so everyone else became passive. He ended overworked, but the root problem is not in his tech skills. It was in his social skills, in the inability to cooperate leading to doing it all alone and in the way management enabled all that due to his past performance.
- bitL 9y ago
  IMO that was a massive management fail. They had a great workhorse doing miracles for them, the guy ended up surrounded by lazy/complacent/incompetent colleagues that just wanted to have good time, he was evidently on the verge of burnout for over a year and then finally fired and blamed for all that was evil in the company. The replacement team of mediocre employees created a very dumbed down version of what they were aiming for and management called it a success. The author of that post should be ashamed of himself they let it go that far due to their complete incompetence. Now reading that HN readers take it as a recipe for their own companies... Oh well.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Negotiating/clarifying requirements is seniors job. Delivering working software instead of something that never seem to be finished and has still bugs is superior leadership. Management aimed at 6 months project. Which got longer due to bugs and mismanaged analysis. Saying that they aimed for something complicated is untrue. They wanted 6 month project and were happy with delivered smaller scope. For that matter, spending a lot of nights in work should not beat "having superior actual results". He did not had results by the end. And he is adult. Managing your own overwork, especially when you have strong negotiation power, is part of what you are expected to do. He failed at that, he was not ready to work independently. Your comment sounds like very willful misreading of original article. There is nothing to suggest that other collegues very lazy or complacent or stupid - zero.
    - bitL 9y ago
      Yes, I agree he should have communicated better and likely his own pride got in the way of suggesting he is overworked. However, management should have never allowed so much strain on a single employee; if one works nights for so long, likely they must have seen his health deteriorating and all kinds of warning signals. That's simply mismanagement at its finest. Ask some top athlete to run marathons every week and see what a shell of a person they become, even if they do that voluntarily. They should have sent him to 2 weeks retreat on Seychelles instead, even forcefully. I inferred lower competence of colleagues from the project they delivered with, as you say, smaller scope. There was also an insightful comment on that article from somebody describing point of view of high performers surrounded by mediocre developers, how they purposefully isolate themselves from dysfunctional teams in order to deliver something and not having their motivation destroyed by complacent teams comprised of people that stopped evolving the moment they got their graduate degrees. As for your next comment, thanks for spotting the author was a "new guy", I confused him with somebody from upper management in that company that was there from the start.
      - watwut 9y ago
        You inferred lower skill from them being able to manage scope and from finishing the project within alotated time. Literally. Project planned originally for 6 months took 2 years and still was not delivered and that is somehow proof of superior ability. Much wow. Simple fact is that Ricks approach failed and people he considered less then him succeeded - through they still have to be coupled with someone assertive enough to be manager. Last note: a lot of pointless overtime in this industy is result of celebrating Ricks and calling teams able to manage work schedule lesser. So people.instead of trying to learn how to manage scope and expectations look down on those who are capable to do it.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >the root problem is not in his tech skills. It doesn't seem to me like there was a root problem. There were several. The primary problems being that he was a bad developer, an asshole and non-cooperative. He wrote idiosyncratic bad code, copy pasta and documented nothing - that wasn't about him being an asshole - that's a lack of basic tech skills. Those are actually the things that led to the company not being able to deliver. I know plenty of perfectly nice junior developers who have done the same thing and if unchecked it causes the same problems they experienced. It doesn't say it, but it's strongly implied that it wasn't just others that had a problem understanding and maintaining his code because of his poor skills - he likely inadvertently made it difficult for himself too.
  - watwut 9y ago
    I hear you, but those failing happen to pretty much everyone who overworks himself too much and don't have feedback. You loose sigh of it, because your brain get it. And you are tired and sleep deprived. Everyone makes mess occasionally and we should not judge people by their worst performance. (Meaning here that he produced both bad and good code). When he did get initial good reputation, he was able to solve problems, he was able to help etc. I think that we should not expect perfection of him nor we need to convince ourselves that he was completely incapable. He was unable to estimate how much time will maintenance of everything take and from there on, he could not win.

clon 9y ago

Mindless over engineering is the hallmark of a mid level engineer - has acquired the technical skills, but not the sense to use them appropriately.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mcnamaratw 9y ago

I'm puzzled that the author doesn't spend some time considering the possibility that Rick might be an idiot. His code was disorganized and possibly way more complex than it needed to be, he had control of his own time but was missing his own ship dates, he was yelling at people ... this isn't necessarily the profile of a genius. The conclusion seems to be "smart people are bad at software" not "Rick wasn't so smart." Maybe it's worth considering both possibilities.

tormeh 9y ago

Rick's not bad, nor is he an asshole (or at least not permanently an asshole). This is what mental illness looks like. I can't say who's to blame for this - the absurd working hours were clearly done willingly - but regardless management could probably have done more to fix the situation. To my mind, Rick needed a forced vacation, a psychologist, and a non-computer related hobby.

lxg 9y ago
Unfortunately, I cannot agree here more with you. I had also a "pleasure" working with such Rick. He was our team leader. At the beginning of our collaboration, things were looking quite ok. However, on the surface, he had serious problems with self-management, managing people and controlling. Later, he would preferably work alone in the office, strongly believing that he is surrounded by "idiots". Often he was not respecting others work, neither the requirements nor deadlines posed by higher management, as he "knew better". Without any doubts, he had a great knowledge, was a very skilled and intelligent guy, but, unfortunately, was becoming unbearable to work with. Putting such person in a management position was definitely a good idea, but, as far as I know, at that time he had the needed expertise to set up the crucial processes in the company. In the last months of our collaboration, majority of the projects he was leading were failing - he was not managing with the deadlines neither wanted to delegate tasks. That time, he would also arrive to the office on monday and would leave home on friday evening or saturday, having just a quick chat with his family in the evening. Without proper sleep, always tired and with huge amounts of stress, he was getting into the loop. He always just needed this extra few hours, almost being there. As a small team, we were strongly pushing him to take holidays, to grab some rest. We were also pushing for us taking more responsibility in the projects - we had quite having quite some personal discussions, but without any success (in the end, we are all just humans and even when you're being managed by a "bad" guy, when you see him completely burning out and losing mind, at least you try your best just to help; knowing that there's his wife with two little daughters waiting for the dad coming from work doesn't make this situation easier). In the end, he just "left" the company (not to face being fired) to a new one, leaving so too our team (we were just re-assigned to other teams) and to build a new one in a new place. Our Rick since the beginning had mental issues, which most of colleagues were not aware. At first sight, he was a very intelligent, charismatic and nice guy. However, the ones who had more contact or worked with him could agree that he exhibited behaviours as in typical Asperger syndrome, behaving also quite often schizophrenic. It's a pity that topic of mental health is quite often neglected, as a proper therapy and an early diagnosis, I guess, could help here, him, his family and his future.