Disclaimer: I witnessed this first hand as a junior technical lead several years ago. This is a stark reminder of how a neglected team member can suffer both professionally and personally. The names have been changed for privacy, and this person did not report to me.
It was early 2001, when Ben walked into the interview with a jovial personality. Ben’s resume was impressive with a laundry list of accomplishments as a Senior Software Engineer. We grilled him in a series of 2-on-1 interview sessions and at no point did he raise any red flags. Ben’s answers were articulate, and he was hired shortly thereafter.
Once Ben had joined the company, the IT Director placed him on production support for our evolving trade platform.
He did this (I believe) for 2 reasons:
- Since we had no training material, it was an easy way to have Ben learn the platform.
- It would place another set of eyes on our critical bug stream.
Ben sliced through malformed XML with the speed and precision of a Japanese master chef. One misplaced decimal point or node could result in thousands of dollars in gain loss, yet none of which happened on Ben’s watch.
As our start up matured, we adopted an agile framework to help quickly meet the needs of our clients. Our core offerings flourished and our teams gelled. This was great news except for Ben, who was still on production support after more than a year. The IT Director had either completely forgotten about Ben, or was unwilling to let him work on new functionality. I imagine if Ben had participated in our shiny new agile team we’d have to actually address our sustained engineering problems.
Ben’s personality slowly deteriorated over time as he watched his coworkers continuously roll out new functionality. One afternoon we found him underneath his desk, sobbing in a fetal position. Needless to say Ben wasn’t with the company for much longer.
What lessons can we learn from this tragedy?
- Good developers want to create code, not continuously patch it.
- Do not leave a team member isolated on a project with no end in sight.
- Training new team members should be mandatory.
- Single points of failure do not save you money in the long run.
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