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Comment by hd95489 | Hacker News Reader

I’m surprised they didn’t house this person. The key to a dysfunctional company is to completely screw over your key workers and drive them out while promoting poor preforming people

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I was expecting that kind of twist too because I’ve seen it in so many companies: Heroic old timer doing the job of 4 engineers because the poor performers were not carrying their own weight. One of the poor performers, instead of doing his work, spends his time schmoozing, boasting, and bullshitting his managers, who then reward him with promotion and fire the old timer. The team falls apart because they fired the only person doing anything, and the brown-noser successfully blames the ex-old-timer.

Take as old as time…!

Absolutely. The majority of old timers are heroes who don’t need to stay and tend to their understaffed garden.

However. There are also old timers who refuse to delegate, only ever giving mindless tasks and not training the new folks to be self-sufficient. “They would just screw it up, it’s better if I do just do it, it’s both faster and better.”

You could argue that’s a leadership problem as well, of course, but my response would be that if you’re the only one who understands a system, you are a leader, and leaders have a responsibility even if they aren’t managers by title.

> You could argue that’s a leadership problem as well, of course, but my response would be that if you’re the only one who understands a system, you are a leader, and leaders have a responsibility even if they aren’t managers by title.

Hear, hear! Anyone who has on-boarded to some legacy system has probably experienced this from one end or the other. The trouble seems to be in getting the heroes, as it were, to recognize that they have a responsibility to properly on-board and train, while simultaneously getting their managers to give them the space to do this work and properly prioritizing it (while also helping to keep the fires at bay... Easily 50% of the on-boarding challenges I have faced in my career were because the person who was responsible for on-boarding me was constantly fire-fighting by themselves).

>However. There are also old timers who refuse to delegate, only ever giving mindless tasks and not training the new folks to be self-sufficient. “They would just screw it up, it’s better if I do just do it, it’s both faster and better.”

Hah, just observed something similar in a different team. They brought a teammate from overseas for training for a month and during that time none of the old timers interacted with this guy at all. Once this teammate returned they were all mumbling how he doesn't know shit. The same old timers are constantly ranting about being the only ones doing weekend maintenance :)

That's a great argument!

The hypothetical person in question gets a leader's salary, title, and responsibility, right?

We're not expecting them to hold up the sky for free?

[waits for audience laughter]

Yes, it’s usually a management issue, because unless that hero person is given a team or put in a team lead type position, it’s frequently impossible to “train others“, especially other devs who are uninterested or have other tasks to do.

It wouldn't surprise me if the rest of the team were consistently exceeding expectations, proposing bullshit initiatives while refusing to touch the parts which were on fire.

Absolutely a solid career move. Touching broken things is a mistake at dysfunctional companies. Much better move to chase the initiative of the year

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