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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> I mean, Rick's a dick, no doubt.

Who, when being worked 12x7, and when given the pressure of being a blocker of everybody else, isn't going to respond poorly? I've seen some of the nicest and even tempered people get short with others when the pressure cooker is really turned up. Rick sounds like he was a good guy to begin with - someone who regularly helped his coworkers, someone his coworkers trusted - until he was overloaded with work.

Fight or flight. When exposed to extreme stressers, people tend to take one of those two paths. Rick took the first. Someone else would have broken down balling, or spiraled into deep depression, or isolated themselves. Don't blame them for being human - blame the company for creating such a terrible environment.

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None of that changes the fact that Rick became an awful co-worker and needed to be removed, whether temporarily or more permanently. Sorry, berating your co-workers repeatedly is a terminable offense in many places.

To go back to my analogy: Frankenstein’s monster still killed a bunch of people at the end of the day, even if it was Frankenstein’s fault that the monster existed at all.

We can blame Frankenstein while still agreeing that his monster should’ve faced consequences for its actions.

Giving someone more tasks than anyone could handle and then firing that person because they don't achieve it is only management's failure. He didn't need to be "removed", he only needed to be managed properly.

Did you read the original article? That wasn’t the crux of why they fired him.

You're missing the point. The way it all happened was essentially "yeah so we beat the guy with a baseball bat and he had the nerve to swing back at us while we did so"

Eh, no it’s not like that at all.

Again this is more like a dog that’s been abused over the years and then mauls a kid.

No ones surprised that the dog is aggressive, and the owners are obviously guilty of abusing an animal - a horrible thing for the owners to have done.

That doesn’t change that the dog’s aggressive now, though, and should be put down.

The sheer depth of badness this comparison reaches is extremely impressive.

Developers are human. They don't need to be put down.

No, but sometimes they need to be fired because the work situation is unrecoverable. Regardless of who’s fault it is.

“Put down” here is an analogy for being fired. I don’t actually think Rick should be put down. I’d hoped that was obvious.

"fired" is a very negative word, but the point is there needs to be a break between company and employee. As someone who was fired for cause in a situation like this, it's the best thing that ever happened to me. The ship was on fire and sinking fast, and I was totally burned out, bailing as fast as I could. Requested my vacation time once we shipped(nearly on schedule) & got fired instead. Felt awful at the time and I was totally bitter, but looking back it was a godsend. 5 weeks later I had a new job, a vacation, and a huge raise. Now I can't imagine why I spent so long there doing miserable work with old dead end tech, crazy overtime, and all for a pittance. Yea it would have been nice to leave on my terms but the important thing was leaving, regardless of fault or method

Same story here.

Although, I was halfway through my journey home when I felt a huge weight had been taken off my back.

Sometimes getting fired is good.

I know you did mean firing, but even that wasn't necessary. In germany we actually force companies to at least try and work things out. In order to fire someone you need 3 documented instances of misbehavior followed up improvement attampts, or an actual breach of law.

This gives everyone time to sit down, gain distance, sleep over it and calm down and try again.

Plus, if the feeling of not getting along remains after that, after some calming down it's often easier to work out a mutually acceptable separation. In a similar situation over here, Rick would've gotten a fairer treatment even on separation, other than "fuck you, bye".

I thought that was also the case in the UK, but it turns out you need to have been employed for 2 years for that rule to apply.

I don't see how anyone who understands what an analogy is would come to the conclusion that the GP is proposing that developers are killed. What's shocking is how ridiculous your comment is.

I know he didn't mean killing. I elaborated in a comment above.

Correction: A dog that's been abused for years by a kid and then mauls the kid while he is himself beating the dog

And then the kid goes on to write an essay about how good he was for finally putting down the dirty beast.

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