[jelan]

It takes a lot of self reflection and maturity to realize mistakes we’ve made in the past, so thank you for sharing this about your career.

I’m wondering if you felt forced out of the company where your reputation was a brilliant hard to work with jerk?

I’ve worked with people like this before and unless the company culture is set up to reward this kind of behavior from the top down, this always ends in said person being worked around and given less and less responsibility and slowly managed out no matter how brilliant they are.

This almost always happens in the polite Silicon Valley way of getting rid of people where no one gets fired and everyone just smiles and works around you until you leave due to “incompetent team members” or “work not challenging anymore”, especially at start up’s who really don’t have the time or money to deal with wrongful termination lawsuits.

Not implying that this is what happened to you, but more so wondering if you felt this at all or it was just self realization that prompted your move and behavior change?

[deanmoriarty]

I did not feel forced out, actually management tried to convince me to stay with a pretty compelling counter offer. I knew I was stuck in a rot of most coworkers and management seeing me as this “brilliant but unapproachable authority”, and I wanted to start fresh in a new place with humbleness. Much easier to do in a new company.

I know what you mean and I have seen other people being managed out of the company with smiles, via gradual marginalization and removal of responsibilities.

If I had to guess why that happened to them is because they were “more jerk, less brilliant”, in my case it was slightly the opposite as my contributions happened to be really significant for that company.