We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.
I filed this under articles that make you go, “Hmmmm…”
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This is a great case study. I’m sure some of you have either experienced some of the points here or at least observed them. The classic is always, “This project wouldn’t exist without me.” There are many variations on that.
I also like the clear mention of how technical debt accrued as well as the supposed complexity was a made up headwind in other words.
The author gives an excellent account of how they moved forward in a positive way. Excellent and well worth the read and pondering for any project.
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Ya, it was one line about sacking management, but it spoke volumes.
Welks, ya, this was a well stated article.
Completely misleading headline. The fired guy is not remotely top talent, according to the description.
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From what I consider, that in order to invent and to build anything you need to be a top talent (IQ160) because you start from scratch and you need lots of insight and advanced precognition in order to stay on the possible right future track.
However this means that once everything is established and the roads and bridges are built, then you have played all of your cards. You can’t create something from scratch twice and you can’t reinvent the wheel expecting to work in a radical new way. Once everything is figured out (the product, the process, the workflow, how customers use it, lessons learnt, how everything works, …) then the entire business becomes a managerial and boring one and falls back to the supporting.
P.S. Then comes a new topic, about if a business should stay close to it’s core values or innovate continuously or even disrupt themselves, this is another huge and different topic. But for this current topic I suggest all business to stay conservative and fix all broken windows first and then try to innovate if they have available R&D resources.
It´s easy, you are a team manager, you like leadership and money but that stops there.
Get the most talented worker, ambitious and really proud of his skills.
Tell him he is the best, make grow his ego.
Delegate to him the main tasks.
Stablish a pyramid power structure.
No teamwork, they could show your superiors that you are useless if they solve things together.
When things start to go wrong, the “genius” try to give his best, work 7 days a week 12 hours a day (is it paid? It´s volunteer extra hours probably).
Let the thing go really bad, you don´t want to show that you don´t have management skills at all.
When it goes really bad, your boss (probably an old college pal, oh such a good time we spent) lands into your department and sees the mess.
Rick is fired.
You are also fired, but you have to recycle following management courses in a resort where they serve lobster for dinner, and some time later you are back (what are college friends for after all).
Rick, a good talent, after sincerelly trying to do his best (someone persuaded him that he was the best), is burnt.
His really good skills will never be available to nobody again.
Even after that someone writes an article giving lessons against skilled geniuses.
All this story really is only about bad management.
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I’ve worked with “genius” programmers like this: they’re not really geniuses - they tend to have charisma which is often mistaken for genius.
Genius programmers can produce functional, usable code - not just the occasional clever solution that works in isolation. People who produce a bloated, untested, buggy mess that never works properly no matter how many hours and hours of hard work they put into it because of the unnecessary and possibly intentionally obfuscating complexity they’ve added for the sake of cleverness aren’t genius programmers.
The worst is the guy who is so self-assured of his own genius, he undoes your bug fixes - without an equivalent replacement fix - or ruins your functional code by replacing it with their buggy, broken copy-pasta mess. Just feels like sabotage.
NEVER work with a guy like Rick if you can avoid it. Their “genius” wears thin quickly, and once you see through them and realize they aren’t the smartest guy in the room, they cannot handle it. Actual geniuses tend to be more self-aware and willing to learn, less boastful, and most importantly competent.
If the “lesser” engineers could replace nearly the entirety of this guy’s code, with 99% of the functionality in a fraction of the time, it wasn’t really all that clever. But I wouldn’t worry about Rick, talkers always land on their feet.
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Where is the boss during all that time?
Who manages and coordinates the projects?
Who is the one that doesn´t know what are the skills and the flaws of the team?
Who sets goals and schedules the job endlines?
Who is the one that lets the things go so wrong?
I am sure that is not the nerve wrecked worker that´s been fired because nobody guided his ego to a right direction.
And if the genius was a bluff, a matter of charisma, who hired him without noticing it? In all that time, with such dark shadows in the horizon?
Being all the day thinking on that new muscle car you are going to buy with your manager salary is really harmful for the company if you don´t do what are you are being paid for.
Geniuses give light to a grey workflow unless you want a purely functional corporation soon to be swallowed by a company in which managers knew how to guide great minds with great capacities and integrate them in great teams.
Geniuses are a necessity, but they have to be properly managed.
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Oh, that’s very normal. Narcissists are naturally good at getting people to believe their own hype - it’s how we get stuck with them as co-workers, bosses, or in political leadership. (Same holds true for charismatic individuals who aren’t narcissists). Ideally hiring managers would be able to weed them out - that is their job after all - but in practice a person who looks and sounds the part will interview better than someone who is highly competent but quieter or has low self-esteem.
The more convinced someone is in their own infallibility, the likelier they’re confusing their ego for intelligence. Not everyone can tell the difference, especially when arrogance is used as an indicator of genius in pop culture. But, ego is not genius.
Again, if he had been truly a programming genius, his work would not have been so quickly and easily replaceable. His “brilliant” code would work. He would not have been undoing other people’s bugfixes while somehow being incapable of replacing them with one of his own because “he wouldn’t be held accountable for supporting other people’s work.”
No one’s questioning the value of genius. I’ve never worked or attended school anywhere I wasn’t considered a highly competent top-performer and I’ve dealt with with plenty of other highly intelligent people. But, I’ve also worked with some people who thought they were a lot smarter than they were. Ego is not an indicator of genius.
Sure, management let him get away with way more than they should have way too long (and were punished accordingly, despite your strange assertion it was probably a college buddy who was hired back(?)). They should’ve paid attention to the quality of his code earlier and disciplined him for removing tested bugfixes without a functional replacement. When management tried to get him back on track, he refused to adapt. But seriously, geniuses don’t need their ego to be managed. And even a genius is responsible for their own behavior.
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For me it sounded more that they pu ta talented guy under the pressure beeing the main stakeholder for the whole project on a longer period of time than it is healthy There a lot of red flags across the article indicating this. A classical tale of missmanagement
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Excellent and interesting replies everyone. It’s interesting to see what facets people pick out of the article and emphasize. It think articles like these and the follow up discussions really help newer and aspiring programmers see more of what is around and ahead of them in ways they don’t now how to quite describe yet.
Keep up the comments and constructive discussions. This is quite helpful.
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While the management indeed sucks and the problem would’ve never gotten so far out of hand had they been less dysfunctional, if external forces were entirely to blame for the fiasco less of the reported internal drama would’ve revolved around his rejection of other co-workers’ help, his tendency to belittle and put down his co-workers, his refusal to give up the reins a bit when management finally realized their error and tried to course correct, and his tantrum that his non-functional code is Einstein-level genius the rest of the monkeys couldn’t comprehend.
I’ve been both the talented, stressed out person with an unfair and unasked level of responsibility and burden on a project, and I’ve been the person who had to work a project with some guy who acted like he was a savant but could talk the talk better than he could code the code (and had to constantly correct their errors only for them to undo my work) so unless the article is being particularly uncharitable to the guy* I still feel like he’s the latter.
* And to be particularly uncharitable enough for me to rethink this, the article would have to be fabricating the parts where he threw a tantrum claiming he’s an Einstein dealing with monkeys and removed tested bugfixes.
Granted, I wasn’t there, I don’t know the guy, and I could be totally off base. But if you’ve ever had to write a comment line telling someone to stop removing your bug-fix at the end of a 12-hour day, you would not be charitable either.
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Also a counter-argument, why you should not fire your top talent. 
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