You fired your top talent. I hope you’re happy.
I recently read a story here titled “We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.”
Lets have a seat, you and I. We need to talk. If you haven’t read the story I linked to, take about 10–15 minutes or so, read up, and soak it all in.
Done? Fantastic. Lets dissect this, because there is so much more than meets the eye here. Presumably, if you have read the story, you understand that the author describes a problem worker that he has dubbed “Rick”. Rick is the local genius with a ton of domain knowledge about their product, and a member of the core development staff for this product.
On the surface, this is a story about a tech bro who thinks that he is god’s gift to them, that they should worship the ground he walks on and that they should be thankful for his very presence, and that they booted Rick’s ass out the door because his reputation cashed checks that his talent couldn’t pay for.
Rockstar complexes happen in nearly every field of work imaginable. In case your field of work or study refers to them differently, rockstars are people who think that their shit doesn’t stink, that they’re the best, and that its beneath them to work well and/or play well with others. They sometimes do quality work, and are doted upon by their peers for it, but in reality are hard to manage, hard to handle, and hard to mold into your team dynamics. Just like real rockstars.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that if you find these people and you are in the process of interviewing them, regardless of whatever modicum of talent they have, they aren’t worth your time because of the loss of morale and teamwork they bring to the team. This is actually something brought up in the story itself — about how Rick ignored team meetings, and belittled his co-workers. About how after Rick left, productivity soared and they managed to pull together to save the day! The author does this to make you hate Rick, and say “yeah! Screw that guy! Sounds like this group’s management finally grew some balls and told that rockstar to go take a hike! I totally wanna work with these people!”
If you were paying attention though, there were some troubling things that you might have picked up along the way:
“ Any time anyone had a question about code or needed help with a task, they would go to Rick. Rick had a giant whiteboard installed in his office used only for this purpose. It was always cluttered with the ghosts of past discussions that wouldn’t quite erase.
Any time there was a particularly challenging problem, Rick would handle it.”
So, right at the very beginning, you can tell that the company is contributing to a culture of dependency on Rick in order to get things done. Rick is our superstar who solves all of our problems, and life is great.
Where is the documentation?
Where are the meetings to discuss these issues and how they were resolved?
Oh, that’s the part that you aren’t being told about, probably because management was so short-sighted. After all, if we have a superstar on-board who can handle all of these problems, Why do we have to worry about documentation and/or continuity of operations if he passes away/gets hit by a bus/gets swallowed by a wormhole/gets a better job offer elsewhere?
If you read in between the lines, it appears that management was complacent to lay problems at Rick’s doorstop, and didn’t care that Rick and/or the team didn’t take time to document the problem and/or resolution.
“Soon, Rick stopped attending meetings. Rick didn’t have time for meetings any more because there was too much to code.
Rick closed his door. His whiteboard lay fallow. Rick no longer had time to train anyone because he had too much to solve on his own.”
Where is management during all this? Where are the metrics? Because seriously, if there is one thing I’ve learned in my experiences in IT and Information Security is that Management wants metrics.
Nobody cared that Rick was missing meetings?
Nobody was measuring open/closed tickets?
Nobody was on-hand to document issues and their resolution as they happened?
Nobody noticed that Rick was shutting himself in as he was pouring more and more work on to his own plate?
They didn’t notice or like most management, they flat-out didn’t care. Things are working, progress is being made, and our little all-star is saving us money, preventing us from having to ship the codebase overseas, so full steam ahead!
“ On our project dashboard, green flags changed to yellow. Yellow changed to red. Red lights started blinking. One by one, task statuses changed to “Impeded.” Everyone was waiting for Rick.”
“ Rick was churning out code faster than ever. He was working seven-day weeks, twelve hours a day.”
So Rick was taking on a much larger workload than he could manage, and in addition to that, was working a 12x7 schedule.
Nobody said anything when they noticed Rick was in the office or logged in remotely for extended hours for days and weeks on end?
Management didn’t come in and demand that Rick take a step back and start documenting his shit?
No team leaders or managers checked Rick’s ticket/bug load and decided that his workload needed to be distributed?
Not only that, but management let this shit go on for two solid years?
Where in flying fuck was management?
Where were the team leads?
“ We sat down with Rick and had a conversation about his role in the project…”
“How did Rick react to this?
The only way Rick could. Rick exploded.
Rick wanted no part of this farce. If we couldn’t appreciate his genius, that was our fault, not his. Rick predicted that within months we’d come crawling back to him begging him to save us.”
Imagine that for months, maybe even years you were considered a lynchpin and a trusted developer for a company. Maybe even responsible for their core product. You have been working 12x7 shifts for who knows how long now. Your checkbook doesn’t seem to reflect that, nobody seems to appreciate it, and the only thing that appears to be happening is that your workload continues to grow, until your grotesque monster of terrible hacks, and undocumented code threatens to stand up and strangle you, not unlike Frankenstein’s monster.
Its fine though.
You’re keeping the ship together. You can come back and fix those hacks later. You can remove those band-aid, improvisational fixes, and replace them with solid workmanship you’d actually be proud of. Not only that, but there are parts of the code you wrote that are starting to become an mystery to even yourself. We’ll come back, disassemble this code, and document it properly. All I have to do is get the product to RTM/GA and I can go back and refine it as necessary. They need me. My work is important. I have to get this done. I can’t fail. We’re running out of funding. I can’t lose this job. Living in $BigCity is too expensive for me to fail.
What will I do if I fail?
How will I recover?
Can I recover?
And before you know it, you’re being asked to meet management, and being told that all of your work is being scrapped, and that we’re starting over. How might you react? and don’t bullshit me that you would accept it with poise and grace. That you would be fine with having all of your work nuked, all of those 12 hour days hacking away at code for hours blown away. That it was all for naught.
I can’t speak for any of you, but I would explode with the fury of a thousand suns. I might say some things that I didn’t mean. I might make some comparisons that might not have been… fully accurate. Burning the candle on both ends can do terrible things to one’s mental and physical health. and instead of addressing the concerns like an adult, and maybe telling Rick that he shouldn’t be the sole lynchpin of your organization, talking him off of the cliff, you just fire him because its easier.
How many days and weeks did he pull 12 hour shifts?
How many family gatherings, birthdays, holidays, etc. did he miss?
Did he have a family?
Did he have friends outside of work?
A loved one?
Children?
Startup culture doesn’t ask these questions because startup culture (and most of IT culture for that matter) doesn’t care about your well-being. Only the work you produce, and having their liabilities limited, in the event they have to fire you.
I’ve been fired before during situations that were less than ideal that I did not think were fair. And while being free from an environment that doesn’t like how you do things and/or doesn’t do things in a way that you feel is conducive is a wonderful feeling, the not-so-wonderful feeling of inadequacy, and having to explain why you left your former position under not-so-friendly terms could be a terrible stigma to deal with when looking for new employment.
That feeling of freedom begins to dwindle as you see your savings account rapidly deplete (Given that the author and the author’s company are in California, where the cost of living is absolutely ridiculous, probably depleting way more rapidly than one would like) and quickly turns into dread as those questions you had while you were working come back to haunt you:
Can you find work in a timely manner?
Is this going to be what breaks you?
Why did they fire you when you gave them everything?
Why did nobody fight to keep you on-board?
They refer to Rick as transforming from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, and his descent over time. Obviously, his co-workers noticed. Maybe they even reported his remarks or his unwillingness to work with others to management. They could’ve nipped this in the bud earlier. They could’ve told Rick to take a step back, and start sharing the burden with his co-workers.
The article doesn’t specify what they did or didn’t do from the company’s end during all of these problems, but judging by the tone, it appears as though they kept placing their problems at Rick’s door, causing the pressure to continue to mount, while not allowing or advising Rick to take time off to recuperate and/or redistrute the workload.
Instead, they played Rick like a fiddle, burned out all of his talent and skill, and once Rick was considered damaged goods, kicked his ass to the curb for the good of the company’s productivity. How brave! How heroic!
The original article claims that firing Rick was the best decision they ever made, but at the end of the day, they lost someone with tons of domain-specific knowledge, someone who worked with the clients to prototype the requirements they desired, and ended up being forced to ship an inferior product with even more of a pushback as they re-invented Rick’s work, complaining about the shitty code. All the while, they remained totally oblivious to the burdens this man was bearing to keep it all together.
Instead of the article being a story about how they stopped this man’s descent into burnout via intervention, outstanding teamwork, and competent management, something that IT, Infosec, and Developers REALLY need to hear, they decided to focus on the toxic environment and problems in which seemed to stem from Rick. Instead of tackling the root cause of the issue (hey man, whats eating you?), they opted for the quick and easy fix (Hey Rick, GTFO!). Par for the course, as far as I can tell.
