I am sorry to hear hear that this have happened to you. But to be honest: This is just moderatly crazy.
I recently got fired for hurting a 19yo feelings.
I was specifically hired to conduct a rewrite (20yo coding, 12 on the platform), and although we already had started, it was brought to my attention, that a newly hired 19yo was pitching for another rewrite. After I had explained first the CEO and then the boy why the boys idea wouldnt work, the CEO agreed and confirmed that the rewrite was solely under my authority. The boy however just declared that he still "wants it", even though I had explained, that we would loose all existing customer and limtit our B2B market by 98%.
The boy and a few other juniors than refused to cooperate with me, although I was his superior. I informed HR and the CEO, asking for help with this situation. The CEO promised to clear the situation but I am not aware of any actions. When HR called me, they explained, that I was fired. They had conducted a survey into my performance: by interview excactly those people I had aksed hr to help me with.
It must have stirred up the company, as roughly 20% of all their staff did get in contact with me, expressing their disbelief. some forwarded me the slack message the ceo had send to all hands to explain what had happedned:
Apparently by rejecting his idea the boy was hurt, and the fact that he was hurt made me a unredeemable bully. and an investigation had found that I had malicious intention already when I joind some month earlier — So I must be a spy now.
The craziest part: The app this company is "building" is not complex. I could build it in a few weeks by myself. and actually there are teams in India and Pakistan that offer the same exact app for $10,000 — but the company is trying and trying to get something out, but in the past 12 month that has just been blog posts in which they blame apple for their ongoing delays. By my estimates they must have spent €1.25million so far in salaries and indirect costs just since I left, but they have not created any value.
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Or in another company, where my manager didn't understand the fundamentals of cause and reaction:
He: "What does it take to speed up development?"
Me: "a full rewrite with real architecture and by best practises."
"He": "how about this: first you speed up the team by — lets say — 7 time, and than I let you rewrite it."
"Me": "I quit"
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In total I would say that I left 3 comanies because of the irrational behavior and I was fired 3 times for bugs, I simply found and fixed; for raising the question, if policies like never give bad feedback are truly useful; and other irrational shit.
Not a single company I workd for the last 12 years did understand some certainties:
* programming is scientific work — it doesnt scale by simply creating bigger teams. In fact Kevlin Henney shows that that can be detrimental. I explain it in more detail in this presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-WckUhhhII&list=PLY5suVncE-vfIoYDOLWggSOk0VtVcF7Tl&index=8&t=1296s
* humans operate irrational and under influence of a lot of biases — but we also have to deal with the compiler, who doesnt eat any bullshit. So developers have two masters.
* only experience recognizes the value of experience. teams with the majority of people with less than at least 5 years of experience are often not able to deliver.
* if it doesnt feel agile it aint agile: https://vikingosegundo.gitlab.io/posts/agile-development-and-architecture/
* the big fallacy that most dev teams are doing: They create a codebase that surpasses a certain complexity very quickly. And than when issues occur, they react by adding ven more complexity. But you wont fight complexity and win. all you can hope for is an endless stallmate. Simplicity is the key to defeating complexity, but that requires experience. it tokk me 10 years, to develop this architecture, whichis only driven by simplicity in mind: https://decodemeester.medium.com/fully-declarative-swift-for-real-world-projects-9b6ee9403f4c
after 12 years of this I have actually decided, to not put myself in such situation again, and started my first project as a solo developer.
