Our Company Fired the Best Developer and Project Manager
And I got some of the biggest lessons of my lifetime.
Recently, our company did an unbelievable but reasonable firing. It’s not like the company was going through some bad economic situations. We were doing very well.
And all of a sudden, the management fired our best developer. Let’s call him “David” in this article (of course, it’s not the real name).
I would never believe it if someone had told me one month ago that David would be fired. Yes, he is that good. Let’s give you an example. He got a job offer from Amazon, but he turned it down because he was making more in our company. And I am sure he could easily go to Google, Facebook, or any other tech company.
But he didn’t because he always told us he wanted to work with freedom and flexibility. That’s not bad. Companies often provide more facilities and flexibility to their best employees.
Then what were the reasons behind the firing? After David’s leaving, our CTO said it was three reasons why he was fired.
The first and the biggest…
The company had increased his salary twice within one year. In the beginning, the management was very happy because David himself did half of the tasks of the tech team.
So, the company thought they were getting a great deal because of what David was doing, three average developers couldn’t do it together. So, they always overlooked the bad sides of David’s code.
What was that?
David’s code was very complex to understand. But he was in charge of some critical sections of our system. It’s not like our project manager liked it, but David always pushed him that he should work alone because working with other developers made him slow.
The truth was he saved our incompetent project manager’s a*s several times. That’s why he became David’s puppet and did not see the big picture there.
So, the first problem occurred when David was on vacation, and we needed some emergency changes in David’s code to fix a bug. But as David used to work alone, there was not enough time to fix the bug within time. Our client got really angry…