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Apple did the right thing to let this person go. Regardless of whether she's wrong or right, you don't let inmates run the asylum. Whenever you have an employee

Apple did the right thing to let this person go. Regardless of whether she's wrong or right, you don't let inmates run the asylum. Whenever you have an employee like this, they are nothing but trouble: insisting on getting everything "in writing," pushing for explicit answers to things they don't have a need-to-know, and otherwise creating negative energy around the office and acting like they run the place. Really, people like this are pure downside for an org. The old saw about rather not hiring ten qualified people than making one bad hire is 100% spot on with this one. Go Apple!

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> The old saw about rather not hiring ten qualified people than making one bad hire is 100% spot on with this one. For everyone who bitches about tech recruiting, I wish they would at least give some empathy to this point of view. In Apple's case, they did make the mistake of this bad hire, and I bet the amount of time, effort, and negative publicity they've had to deal with, not to mention how this kind of toxic behavior just kills morale at organizations, is orders of magnitude worse than with an average employee. During the period I was a manager, I hated how the majority of my attention, work stress and time was devoted to handling a toxic individual, as opposed to all my other employees who were working hard to make the team better. And to be clear, my judgement of this person as an individual I would loath having to work with literally has nothing to do with others' descriptions of her, it solely has to do with her own words that she has published.
- luckylion 5y ago
  > hated how the majority of my attention, work stress and time was devoted to handling a toxic individual I've witnessed this in a startup I was peripherally involved with and know the founder quite well. The lead science guy had serious narcissism issues and he was seriously slowing them down by making every meeting about himself, constantly angling for more power and being unreasonable. When they finally fired him after an especially dumb maneuver, it was like the sun has come up after a dark night. Processes suddenly "just worked", juniors were taking over responsibilities and growing quickly into their roles, and the whole team got along much better. They made much better progress without him.
- legerdemain 5y ago
  Seriously, if they had only asked her to reconstruct a BST from a preorder and a postorder, they would have definitely avoided this problem.
itisit 5y ago
I find such Professional Nuisances are adept at rapidly increasing how irritating they are as others come to realize the PN is providing little to no business value or what value is provided isn’t enough to compensate for the irritation. Generally PNs are gossipy martyrs that thrive on bringing down others and denigrating their employer as they put up a false front of whistleblowing and/or positive disruption. A good HR team knows the signs and shows such folks the door ahead of any debacle.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> The old saw about rather not hiring ten qualified people than making one bad hire is 100% spot on with this one. For everyone who bitches about tech recruiting, I wish they would at least give some empathy to this point of view. In Apple's case, they did make the mistake of this bad hire, and I bet the amount of time, effort, and negative publicity they've had to deal with, not to mention how this kind of toxic behavior just kills morale at organizations, is orders of magnitude worse than with an average employee. During the period I was a manager, I hated how the majority of my attention, work stress and time was devoted to handling a toxic individual, as opposed to all my other employees who were working hard to make the team better. And to be clear, my judgement of this person as an individual I would loath having to work with literally has nothing to do with others' descriptions of her, it solely has to do with her own words that she has published.

luckylion 5y ago
> hated how the majority of my attention, work stress and time was devoted to handling a toxic individual I've witnessed this in a startup I was peripherally involved with and know the founder quite well. The lead science guy had serious narcissism issues and he was seriously slowing them down by making every meeting about himself, constantly angling for more power and being unreasonable. When they finally fired him after an especially dumb maneuver, it was like the sun has come up after a dark night. Processes suddenly "just worked", juniors were taking over responsibilities and growing quickly into their roles, and the whole team got along much better. They made much better progress without him.
legerdemain 5y ago
Seriously, if they had only asked her to reconstruct a BST from a preorder and a postorder, they would have definitely avoided this problem.

itisit 5y ago

I find such Professional Nuisances are adept at rapidly increasing how irritating they are as others come to realize the PN is providing little to no business value or what value is provided isn’t enough to compensate for the irritation. Generally PNs are gossipy martyrs that thrive on bringing down others and denigrating their employer as they put up a false front of whistleblowing and/or positive disruption. A good HR team knows the signs and shows such folks the door ahead of any debacle.