Honestly, that sounds more like acting on envy and perhaps Rick noticed and withdrew himself further.
I guess being too eccentric isn't good for teaching, just like lacking patience leads to problems.
I get the message, performance isn't everything, but there are other shallow truths about the workplace. Like competency doesn't make you the most loved person. And this article honestly feels a bit like that.
Seems odd that they waited so long to fire “Rick”, and seemed quite fine letting him work on everything solo for years, despite the continued delays to the customer.
In the event that this article is actually a true story (tbh it reads like a long version of one of those LinkedIn thought-leader posts), that seems like a company culture failure several levels deep.
For some reason I had a feeling of "The Apartment, from Billy Wilder"
It seems that he helped everybody to solve their problems and doubts for years. If this is not "being able to work in a team" I don't know hot to define it.
After the years, this created a demigod, they drive him crazy and overworking and when the stream of favors eventually stopped people got angry (because "he ownes you infinite whishes"?).
Of course starting from scratch helped, but the efficiency increase can be explained also in part because people got a clear message: "If they let go the rock star, nobody is safe from being fired. Better we stop playing politics and schemes, say that all was Ricks fault, fix our shit and have something, anything simple, to show tomorrow"
Buying code is also a symptom. Displacing responsibility to an external company is a common "covering ass" strategy.
I could be wrong, of course, I don't have all the data but... the man helped you for years. I understand that didn't ended well, but... didn't deserved some respect? What is the point on criticizing an easily identifiable former coworker on internet?
One of the ways you tell you have someone with exceptionally high IQ on your hands is people will scapegoat them. Talent is being able to hit a targets nobody else can hit, genius is being able to hit targets nobody else can see, and the problem with hitting unseeable targets consistently is that the ground starts shifting under people's feet and they have no idea why.
For example, at one place I worked I found the source of a 7-figure inventory shrink problem that had been there for 10ish years and was caused by 1 line of SQL Code. Now you'd think out of THOUSANDS of employee's and THOUSANDS of management and IT Staff, someone would've gone "Gee we have a lot of inventory shrink" and go take a look.
What does your management do when they lose all of their bargaining leverage with customers due to customers finding out their warehousing co lost tens of millions of dollars of inventory? Staff theft accounted for a lot of the missing inventory, so you have employee trust issues added into the mix. You wouldn't believe the blowback from that I got, total nightmare fuel. Managers could not, psychologically, handle the truth of the situation; it was armegeddon to them.
At another manufacturing company I fixed serious data quality issues that were caused by previous management, over decades, forcing the place to run too lean. A High rate of order change had guacamole'd all downstream data from the order book to the AR register in their workflow process. They had hired a BP guy just to do nothing but BP for years on end and he couldn't figure it out. Because nothing appeared consistent to managers thus the data was never consistent. I put together a powerpoint and had a whole boardroom of c-levels grimacing at the findings.
What do your c-levels do when you show them all of their data is literal trash? What do they do when you correct the manufacturing product data so they don't have to go on research projects all the time, which in turn de-controrts the rest of their data enough to begin to make it look usable, and staff begin making big changes to processes that save buko bucks because they have the information when the c-suite couldn't do it for 20 years? Imagine how motivated someone who has 20 years into a company is going to be to fuck over or the guy who comes in and shows them where their limitations were at? Again, they are not psychologically equipped to handle the change.
Instead of accepting the failure and addressing it then moving on, what do they do? A Great deal many of executives and staff engage in engineering and management emotionally; they use their limbic system to navigate their day to day, but developing that takes years of work and deep integration with their personality, identity, and sense of self. When a seriously traumatic event occurs, like the above situations which BTW are great for an org; we're adding million in revenue by fixing mistakes; people deal with it like a trauma. Their limbic system wants to maintain emotional regulation, thus, they will often go through the process of grief in a corporate setting, presenting a number of "feel good" strawman arguments and isolating the person who found the issue.
The empirical data, however, does not care about your emotions, and if this is done consistently in an org, the genius gets associated with "pain, bad, nightmare fuel, bad". Hence, you get scatching articles about the genius we didn't need that got in our way and if you put the word "we should burn all geniuses" at the end, it'd fit right in with the undertones of the article.
The genius knows what they are doing, they can see it clearly, they can proove it empirically, and they are often doing it for an altruistic reason because they want the world to be a better place. They have a difficult itch to scratch, to be satisfied with their lives they need to do things that challenge them, it's human. But the fallout for an org can be detrimental.
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[ 59.9 ms ] story [ 332 ms ] threadI guess being too eccentric isn't good for teaching, just like lacking patience leads to problems.
I get the message, performance isn't everything, but there are other shallow truths about the workplace. Like competency doesn't make you the most loved person. And this article honestly feels a bit like that.
In the event that this article is actually a true story (tbh it reads like a long version of one of those LinkedIn thought-leader posts), that seems like a company culture failure several levels deep.
An old post, this is :)
It seems that he helped everybody to solve their problems and doubts for years. If this is not "being able to work in a team" I don't know hot to define it.
After the years, this created a demigod, they drive him crazy and overworking and when the stream of favors eventually stopped people got angry (because "he ownes you infinite whishes"?).
Of course starting from scratch helped, but the efficiency increase can be explained also in part because people got a clear message: "If they let go the rock star, nobody is safe from being fired. Better we stop playing politics and schemes, say that all was Ricks fault, fix our shit and have something, anything simple, to show tomorrow"
Buying code is also a symptom. Displacing responsibility to an external company is a common "covering ass" strategy.
I could be wrong, of course, I don't have all the data but... the man helped you for years. I understand that didn't ended well, but... didn't deserved some respect? What is the point on criticizing an easily identifiable former coworker on internet?
For example, at one place I worked I found the source of a 7-figure inventory shrink problem that had been there for 10ish years and was caused by 1 line of SQL Code. Now you'd think out of THOUSANDS of employee's and THOUSANDS of management and IT Staff, someone would've gone "Gee we have a lot of inventory shrink" and go take a look.
What does your management do when they lose all of their bargaining leverage with customers due to customers finding out their warehousing co lost tens of millions of dollars of inventory? Staff theft accounted for a lot of the missing inventory, so you have employee trust issues added into the mix. You wouldn't believe the blowback from that I got, total nightmare fuel. Managers could not, psychologically, handle the truth of the situation; it was armegeddon to them.
At another manufacturing company I fixed serious data quality issues that were caused by previous management, over decades, forcing the place to run too lean. A High rate of order change had guacamole'd all downstream data from the order book to the AR register in their workflow process. They had hired a BP guy just to do nothing but BP for years on end and he couldn't figure it out. Because nothing appeared consistent to managers thus the data was never consistent. I put together a powerpoint and had a whole boardroom of c-levels grimacing at the findings.
What do your c-levels do when you show them all of their data is literal trash? What do they do when you correct the manufacturing product data so they don't have to go on research projects all the time, which in turn de-controrts the rest of their data enough to begin to make it look usable, and staff begin making big changes to processes that save buko bucks because they have the information when the c-suite couldn't do it for 20 years? Imagine how motivated someone who has 20 years into a company is going to be to fuck over or the guy who comes in and shows them where their limitations were at? Again, they are not psychologically equipped to handle the change.
Instead of accepting the failure and addressing it then moving on, what do they do? A Great deal many of executives and staff engage in engineering and management emotionally; they use their limbic system to navigate their day to day, but developing that takes years of work and deep integration with their personality, identity, and sense of self. When a seriously traumatic event occurs, like the above situations which BTW are great for an org; we're adding million in revenue by fixing mistakes; people deal with it like a trauma. Their limbic system wants to maintain emotional regulation, thus, they will often go through the process of grief in a corporate setting, presenting a number of "feel good" strawman arguments and isolating the person who found the issue.
The empirical data, however, does not care about your emotions, and if this is done consistently in an org, the genius gets associated with "pain, bad, nightmare fuel, bad". Hence, you get scatching articles about the genius we didn't need that got in our way and if you put the word "we should burn all geniuses" at the end, it'd fit right in with the undertones of the article.
The genius knows what they are doing, they can see it clearly, they can proove it empirically, and they are often doing it for an altruistic reason because they want the world to be a better place. They have a difficult itch to scratch, to be satisfied with their lives they need to do things that challenge them, it's human. But the fallout for an org can be detrimental.
What th...
I would define that pretty clearly as NOT being a "top contributor".