Who, when being worked 12x7, and when given the pressure of being a blocker of everybody else, isn't going to respond poorly? I've seen some of the nicest and even tempered people get short with others when the pressure cooker is really turned up. Rick sounds like he was a good guy to begin with - someone who regularly helped his coworkers, someone his coworkers trusted - until he was overloaded with work.
Fight or flight. When exposed to extreme stressers, people tend to take one of those two paths. Rick took the first. Someone else would have broken down balling, or spiraled into deep depression, or isolated themselves. Don't blame them for being human - blame the company for creating such a terrible environment.
To go back to my analogy: Frankenstein’s monster still killed a bunch of people at the end of the day, even if it was Frankenstein’s fault that the monster existed at all.
We can blame Frankenstein while still agreeing that his monster should’ve faced consequences for its actions.
Again this is more like a dog that’s been abused over the years and then mauls a kid.
No ones surprised that the dog is aggressive, and the owners are obviously guilty of abusing an animal - a horrible thing for the owners to have done.
That doesn’t change that the dog’s aggressive now, though, and should be put down.
Developers are human. They don't need to be put down.
“Put down” here is an analogy for being fired. I don’t actually think Rick should be put down. I’d hoped that was obvious.
This gives everyone time to sit down, gain distance, sleep over it and calm down and try again.
Plus, if the feeling of not getting along remains after that, after some calming down it's often easier to work out a mutually acceptable separation. In a similar situation over here, Rick would've gotten a fairer treatment even on separation, other than "fuck you, bye".
Although, I was halfway through my journey home when I felt a huge weight had been taken off my back.
Sometimes getting fired is good.
See also: Steve Jobs, famously.
* Why this became such a big problem (and wasn't resolved earlier)
* How to prevent it from happening in the future
Because if one team can effectively silo themselves so well that problems like Rick are allowed to fester for multiple years, I don't have high hopes for the future for them.
"No doubt" a real person is a dick, because of a single-sourced account from those who fired him, which even at that, leaves the question of their own failures wide open?
As the article points out, working endless overtime to the detriment of the rest of your life - not to mention isolating yourself from those around you - will play havoc with your mental health, sense of perspective, and general wellbeing.
Most people (at least in my experience, you know, the one who's making the subjective judgement about him being a dick) can be angry without saying something pretentiously mean like that.
It's ok for the conclusion here to be, "Rick's an asshole who should've been fired but management fucked up pretty badly." Situations don't have to be binary with only one party at fault.
EDIT: Let's also not forget the accounts of Rick supposedly berating people in meetings. If multiple people think you're being mean to them, you're probably being mean.
Similarly I can understand how an aggressive dog came to be (poor training, etc.). That won’t change my opinion that the dog should be put down when it mauls a kid, you know?
Blaming an innocent for how they were cultivated is silly. Especially when those innocents can be rehabilitated.
We're getting a little off topic, but this company is just setting up another Rick to take the blame when the train goes off the tracks again.
That doesn’t mean the dog shouldn’t be put down. It just means there are also other parties at fault.
All it takes is one person in power to care enough to see to that rehabilitation to transform an aggressive "dick" back into a productive team member.
No, it very much does.
We are not cavemen to assign labels to people based only on external outcomes. Ever courts take emotional state and other circumstances into account.
The court might take your emotional state into account when you murder someone, but if they’ve got you dead-to-rights you’re still going to prison.
Does Rick deserve to get blacklisted? No. Would I have been incredibly upset if they named the individual? Yes.
Did Rick deserve to get fired even though they basically set him up to get fired? Yep, he still does.
Did Rick react inappropriately to a horrible situation? Yep, he did.
Doesn't matter.
Someone backed into a corner is just act like someone backed into a corner. The die was already cast. Everything that happens after is blame-shifting.
I absolutely get to say what the arbitrary line is in this case because I’m the one making the subjective judgment that Rick was most likely being an asshole.
If Rick had snapped and shot up the place would you think he should face no consequences?
I'm sorry I insufficiently hedged my tolerance of someone showing anger when pressed and didn't think to explicitly cover the case of escalation to violence.
I absolutely get to say what the arbitrary line is in this case because I’m the one making the subjective judgment
And I absolutely get to tell you that in my assessment you're wrong. That how opinions work.
I mean, Rick's a dick, no doubt. But much like Frankenstein's monster, it's incredibly easy to see who had a hand in transforming Rick into what he became. It's hard to read the original article and not see several large "where the hell was management" red flags:
> Any time there was a particularly challenging problem, Rick would handle it.
That's a management failure, and a particularly egregious one that I see new or overly passive managers make. How do you expect one person not to have all of your domain knowledge if they're solving all of the challenging problems?
Fixing this doesn't even involve being super confrontational:
"I'll fix <database issue 123>." "Hey, Rick, you're already working on XYZ and I want Summer to get some experience working with our database system, so I'd like for her to do it."
> First, he created a cult of dependence.
Because management idly sat by and let him do that. People want to feel irreplaceable and like they're exceptional. One way to do that is to create this cult of dependence. Management's job is to step in and re-assure Rick that he's a valued member of the team while also directly confronting this cult of dependence.
We do this all the time at my job, and we don't even do it using complete thoughts. We just say "bus factor" and everyone understands why one person can't be responsible all the time for something (or in this case, everything).
> Team members didn’t want to speak up and offer their own ideas because he always berated them for it.
Holy shit, you didn't torch his ass for berating people in meetings? Are there even managers at this company?
This, to me, is the worst failure. Either management is ignorant of the berating (bad) or they silently tolerated it (even worse).
I really hope the managers at that company are taking a long hard look in the mirror and doing a post-mortem on what went wrong with Rick. I suspect they're not, and attributing it to one bad employee, but I can hope.