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“Nothing I’ve created will ever make even the slightest sense to you. I’m Albert F***ing Einstein, and the rest of you are just primates in the jungle!”
Our resident genius, Dr. Jekyll, changed into Mr. Hyde in a shocking heartbeat.
He said this in front of the pre-launch customers, the product design team, the developers, management, and the team. The trigger? One of the project’s sponsors had asked how the problem impeding the adoption of our product was progressing.
This developer was the beast that served as the team’s inconsistent genius. You could occasionally have the good fortune to collaborate alongside a genius. Sometimes your lot is to deal with pure madness. It can occasionally be difficult to tell the two apart.
This tale is about the demise of a very talented team member who had a thorough knowledge of the design of our product. He possessed a remarkable capacity for predicting requirements for the future and a wealth of domain expertise.
He was our MVP. Yet, he was unilaterally sabotaging our main endeavor.
We’ll refer to him as “Tom.”
Tom was regarded as the best player on the squad by everybody. He was our software projects’ principal developer and architect.
Anyone who wanted assistance with a task or had a query about programming would go to Tom. Tom erected a huge whiteboard in his workplace just for this reason. It was always filled with the unfinished remnants of previous conversations.
Tom would confront any circumstance that was particularly challenging. Tom set up a server at his desk with identical specs to our production server. He was able to separately run and troubleshoot each tier of the application stack thanks to this.
Tom didn’t need anybody else. Tom enjoys working alone in his own office.
Tom didn’t need anything that was made by anybody else. Everything he needed was made from scratch since it was considerably more advanced than what regular mortals could produce.
As he had “too much coding to do,” Tom eventually stopped attending meetings. Big red flag right there — how do you coordinate with your team without attending meetings?
