I’m sorry but this isn’t a problem with “Rick”. This was first and foremost a management problem. Yes I know they fired the management too but the focus of the article is still on everything that’s wrong with Rick but you can see how management failed him. He was first a great employee who helped others but over time he was given more and more responsibility until he became a single source of failure and didn’t have time to help. They place everything on his shoulders and even encouraged it by giving him a production server spec workstation and not reining in his bad tendencies or corner cutting, which he might have been forced to do given the time pressure.

This is a scenario that’s all too familiar where management hires a great talent and then just uses that person to solve all their problems instead of actually managing and building a team that can handle the problems.

Management failed the company and Rick. The article author clearly failed to see that and focused entirely on the wrong root cause.

A much better story would be to tell it with a focus on management who was either too incompetent, too lazy, or both to properly build, manage, and grow/mentor a team.