
We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made - stareatgoats
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-best-decision-we-ever-made-4c0a99728fde/
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pvaldes
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?

~~~
TheBobinator
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.

What they don't have, due to a lack of adaquete socialization, is a sense when
they are reorienting other people's realities too much. To develop that
socialization, they need people of similar IQ that can keep pace with them
because they start out life with a seriously debiltiating situation. Someone
with an IQ of 150-170 will have the mental developement of a 9 year old at age
5, and a 20 something by age 9. Imagine being 25, in a room of people who look
just like you but who inside are all 9 year olds and that's your life, end to
end.

You will, guarauntee'd, develop complex trauma due to this. And the 9-year
olds, quite naturally, demand you pick up "social skills" and "soft skills"
because they sense instinctually something is wrong or off. What they don't
understand is that someone with an IQ of 160 is literally 1 in 10 million;
they figure if you're so smart you can figure it out. It does not work that
way.

HR people are beginning to figure this out, and their response in general is
not to hire geniuses because they know they cannot handle them. The problem
they run into is, it's almost impossible to tell if someone is less
intelligent than you, and utterly impossible to tell if they are more, and if
you measure them by success, then eventually, their success will turn into the
above at some point.

A better way to have handled the OP's situation is to give the genius an
architectural role to alleviate from them the burden of writing boilerplate
code, and have them working on system design and doing proof of concept
projects. Many established companies have built internal think tanks for this
purpose; it's how they house their geniuses.

~~~
thelastinuit
Love this, thanks!

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jwilber
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.

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raxxorrax
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.

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fatnoah
>He was our top contributor. He was killing our flagship project.

I would define that pretty clearly as NOT being a "top contributor".

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audiometry
“Rick” is a Bizarro Mary Jane character. Zzzzz

