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Let’s talk about teams with where you have one person doing everything. They are creating deadbeats. Does it never cross anyone’s mind that the way to fix this

Let’s talk about teams with where you have one person doing everything. They are creating deadbeats. Does it never cross anyone’s mind that the way to fix this is to move that person off of the team? Often they are sucking the oxygen out of the room with a strong personality or dogmatism for some personal ideal of quality. The manager lets them run with it because the work is getting done but that manager is bad because his team is languishing. I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly. These leads who want to run everything don’t have the energy to convince people well, instead they just write so much complicated code as fast as possible to beat anyone else to the space. It’s not just ego it’s a matter of avoiding a hostile work environment being hostage to this one persons gatekeeping. They dedicate their lives to work and spend insane hours so that no one else has the fitness to compete with them. They see that their team is getting left behind and continue full steam ahead. It’s sad for everyone involved.

yCombLinks 4y ago
I had a guy like that did something like this. He jumped on any new project and did all the interesting pieces as quickly as possible. He also built it with very non-idiomatic code. Despised working with his stuff, even though if he was the only person on the project it was fine, he was very productive.
trieste92 4y ago
> I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly From my experience whenever this happens the people who get "pushed out of the way" were useless to begin with
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > were useless to begin with Or useless with office politics, and didn’t manage to market themselves well with the new lead. It’s never been clean-cut in my experience.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Looks like we found the guy that pushes everyone away. Who else would excuse this behavior from a “lead” developer? A lead developer should be working (or at least trying) with their team to empower the team as a whole, not blazing ahead on point leaving the squad in the dark, no matter how “brilliant” they are.

yCombLinks 4y ago

I had a guy like that did something like this. He jumped on any new project and did all the interesting pieces as quickly as possible. He also built it with very non-idiomatic code. Despised working with his stuff, even though if he was the only person on the project it was fine, he was very productive.

trieste92 4y ago

> I’ve seen this so many times where engineers get pushed out of the way by a new lead engineer and their workloads drop significantly From my experience whenever this happens the people who get "pushed out of the way" were useless to begin with

MonkeyClub 4y ago
> were useless to begin with Or useless with office politics, and didn’t manage to market themselves well with the new lead. It’s never been clean-cut in my experience.
cudgy 4y ago
Looks like we found the guy that pushes everyone away. Who else would excuse this behavior from a “lead” developer? A lead developer should be working (or at least trying) with their team to empower the team as a whole, not blazing ahead on point leaving the squad in the dark, no matter how “brilliant” they are.