I mean, Rick's a dick, no doubt. But much like Frankenstein's monster, it's incredibly easy to see who had a hand in transforming Rick into what he became. It's hard to read the original article and not see several large "where the hell was management" red flags:
> Any time there was a particularly challenging problem, Rick would handle it.
That's a management failure, and a particularly egregious one that I see new or overly passive managers make. How do you expect one person not to have all of your domain knowledge if they're solving all of the challenging problems?
Fixing this doesn't even involve being super confrontational:
"I'll fix <database issue 123>." "Hey, Rick, you're already working on XYZ and I want Summer to get some experience working with our database system, so I'd like for her to do it."
> First, he created a cult of dependence.
Because management idly sat by and let him do that. People want to feel irreplaceable and like they're exceptional. One way to do that is to create this cult of dependence. Management's job is to step in and re-assure Rick that he's a valued member of the team while also directly confronting this cult of dependence.
We do this all the time at my job, and we don't even do it using complete thoughts. We just say "bus factor" and everyone understands why one person can't be responsible all the time for something (or in this case, everything).
> Team members didn’t want to speak up and offer their own ideas because he always berated them for it.
Holy shit, you didn't torch his ass for berating people in meetings? Are there even managers at this company?
This, to me, is the worst failure. Either management is ignorant of the berating (bad) or they silently tolerated it (even worse).
I really hope the managers at that company are taking a long hard look in the mirror and doing a post-mortem on what went wrong with Rick. I suspect they're not, and attributing it to one bad employee, but I can hope.