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by avg_dev 1561 days ago
Having been demoted and fired, but never having been in a management/doing-the-firing position, it is nice to see the other side of this. I thought this was a relatively fair treatment to the employee being fired and also shines a light on what the title is indicating: sometimes there is some benefit to the people around.

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> There are jobs that are bad fits, but not bad employees.

>

> Scenario 3: Summarily Dismissed

> OK, that’s not entirely true.

Made me chuckle. So did

> We were not asking for him to be fired. Except we were.

It's funny how the perspective shifts to reality given some distance and time.

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I also thought he might be wrong about Bob; maybe Bob can and did or will learn good software development principles. Perhaps Mad Ned is being unnecessarily harsh. Or perhaps I'm overly optimistic. But I remember a time when I couldn't write code very well at all. Now, I can, at least when the stars align properly... and one of the nice things about code is the malleable nature of it: get it right once, and it is in source code management history forever.
1 comments
13of40 1561 days ago
I had a "Bob" a few years ago who was a unique case: He was a very intelligent, experienced senior developer who at some point lost his ability to actually ship. Given a relatively straightforward feature, he went into agonizing detail in his documentation, spent months implementing layer upon layer of abstractions, held himself to noble standards like never testing or debugging on a production server...and the end result after a year (plus) of effort was a repo full of such high-brow code that nobody could make sense of it. Once he was gone, we got a junior developer to rewrite his last feature in two weeks.

He was moved around between a few managers after he passed the zenith of his 15 year stint at that company, but from what I was able to piece together he didn't succeed in bringing a single feature to production in the last five years he was there. He was just so darned friendly and smart that nobody was willing to do the needful and separate him.

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