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>> They estimate he saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars... tens of thousands of servers he decommissioned

Sounds a little far-fetched. Slack, Airbnb and Netflix spend about 6M, 17M and 28M on AWS monthly; to SAVE "hundreds of millions" the company would need to be ridiculously large and inefficient.

Or used a mix of oracle/sun/IBM hardwares and the like. I can imagine easily 9 digits yearly budget including licenses.

GP didn't provide a denominator. Assuming a year, which is typical for such calculations, your example figures become: Slack: 72M, 204M, 336M. Two out of the three are already in "hundreds of millions of dollars", per year.

GP could also be talking about savings over expected life time of the servers if they were not decommissioned, which could easily be 5+ years.

What did he do to piss people off? It seems as though you are burying the lede here.

Doesn’t sound good. There has to be balance. Focusing on individual performance, culture be dammed is toxic as well.

At the beginning of my career, I had faced the same issue. This was at a casino gaming company. During the first year I was the top performer, but due to the GFC (2008) i got peanuts. The next year, the director got his old report as a manager for us. This manager created interference between me and the director, i got multiple people coming and telling me to listen to the manager and submit to him. I was entirely sidelined, given miniscule raises and bonuses. other people who deferred to the manager and followed his words were promoted.

Fortunately for me a director from another group who knew my work, took me under his wing and I was finally able to thrive.

Does not matter the exceptional work you do, its always about listening to your "superiors". Ofc this depends on the organization. Not every place will be like this

> When your work is a popularity contest and not measured on actual performance, its a toxic mix.

Your ability to get on well with others, and work effectively as a part of a team is a component of your _actual performance_. It’s probably the most important component. The only real mistake here seems like this guy should have been fired instead.

I think that’s a massive assumption on your part. How do you feel that you have enough information to conclude that he ought to have been fired?

The person described in the parent post was so difficult to get on with that they had to be moved to another project, and they are described has having pissed off a large number of people, including more than one level of management. The two possible explanations are, the majority of the company is highly toxic, this particular IC is highly toxic. So unless the posters wife is a remarkably toxic manager, the most likely explanation is that the IC is. Definitely sounds like the company would benefit from sacking them.

> Your ability to get on well with others [... is] probably the most important

Not all work is being performed by cooperating teams.

A lot of high-value work is carried out by individuals.

Some of those are not cooperative.

You don't need to be cooperative to be of high value.

It just helps in a lot of cases, and it's nice for others either way.

This isn’t true at all. Unless you are the only person who consumes the work you produce, and you produce it without the input of anybody else, then you work on a team, and how you get along with the other people in that team is the most important factor in your success.

When the code doesn't work you can let the customer know that the team bond has never been stronger. The most important thing is delivering the product, working on a team is often critical for that but sometimes you need a few skilled individuals over a army of collaborators to get a product over the finish line.

> > Not all work is being performed by cooperating teams. A lot of high-value work is carried out by individuals.

> This isn’t true at all.

Yes, it is true, because if the opposite were true, all work is being carried out by groups.

I have personal testimony, which is all you need when making a “not all” claim. :-)

So you are not assigned work by anybody? You do not rely on any other person to provide an input to the work you are doing? You do not deliver the work that you complete to anybody? And it is not subsequently used by anybody else for any purpose? Because if you do any of those things, then congratulations, you have to cooperate with other people to do your work.

I did have such a job, yes. No customers, no clients, no end users.

But that is not what I’m saying; I’m saying you can be a disagreeable person on average, but because you work on a team of you, you only need to get along with your boss, who will leave you alone most of the time.

If you disincentivize (constructive) conflict, then you end up with a team stuck in groupthink that can't critically evaluate problems. It can be unpopular to present differing opinions, but it can also make the team stronger.

You filled in gaps in GP's post with a lot of assumptions. I read it as someone that can work effectively in a team. But also had conflicts with coworkers. If those were those healthy conflicts or unhealthy conflicts wasn't even discussed. That your first conclusion is to fire based on the absence of info is absurd. You jumped onto bandwagon of others opinions and acted recklessly. Maybe you should be fired instead?

Whether conflict is constructive or toxic depends on personality traits, not the topic of the conflict. The person described in the parent post doesn’t seem to have a personality capable of constructive conflict, otherwise they wouldn’t have “pissed off” the large number of people the poster alluded to.

I disagree. You can piss people off without doing anything wrong too. Complaints should be investigated, not taken at face value. This kind of ranking creates cliques and in-groups which can result in brigading. If someone is pissed off at another coworker, first question should be why.

you are right but conflict involves at least two and it needs only one to turn toxic

The management is the one holding a grudge for something he did in the past. Not a lot of "turning the other cheek" for someone who you can bury into tasks and come back with reward.

Good management can de-escalate the situation and exploit his personality to work the system better. Not a lot of management Chess going on here, just people valuing feelings over making money. Not paying the guy the fair market worth for the work he did, isn't going to make him any more nice to work with.

this paints me an accurate picture of things

This story is nonsensical.

Engineers don't negotiate contracts at large companies. The legal department does. Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.

I can see this guy exaggerating the work he actually did, and taking credit for the work of others, which would explain the low rating and why everyone else dislikes him.

The legal department doesn't do discovery and evaluation. Its job is to ensure the contract is good for all relevant parties and stakeholders - not to pick the brand of the turbo encabulator you need for your IoT Web3 crane welder controller dashboard project.

I imagine you need to cross a certain combination of company size and project profile/visibility before legal & procurement aren't just sanity-checking and rubber-stamping whatever purchase orders the engineering teams send their way.

It's entirely normal to see engineers negotiating contracts at large companies. Large companies are, after all, mostly a collection of smaller teams that self-manage to a large degree.

> Engineers are kept as far away from the negotiating table as possible because they're to easy for counterparties to manipulate.

That's what the sales people want you to believe - to ensure they don't have to deal with anyone who understands the problem space of the product/service they're selling.

Engineers will participate in selecting contract features; it's the equivalent of telling a car dealer you want a car with Android Auto and a sunroof. Engineers absolutely do not negotiate contracts.

It's pretty clear from the replies to my comment that you guys don't actually know what is involved in negotiating a B2B contract. The stuff the engineers are allowed to participate in is the layer of snow covering the tip of the iceberg.

I suppose we have a different perspective (and experience) about what is the snow, and what is the iceberg.

Last time I dealt with this as an engineer, I picked a vendor, procured a quote, discussed how license applies to our usage (which was somewhat of a corner case for the license), and forwarded it to procurement - few days later, we got the exact thing I asked for, on the conditions and for the price I agreed to with the vendor. Were there extra negotiations I'm not aware of done to close that deal? I don't know. If they were, they didn't have any impact I could observe from where I was sitting.

Yeah, as far as contract negotiations went, you picked the color of the car and got the quote from the dealer.

The real negotiating happened when you handed it off to procurement. Their job was to secure the contract with the terms and features you wanted, and it sounds like they did that. I think that's part of why so many programmers de-value the work of the back office (Legal, Finance, HR, etc). Good back-offices work in the background to get important shit done with minimal, if any, interference to the revenue-generating operations of the business.

Not true. I negotiated a major software license at a large company over twenty years ago - when I wasn't even a permanent employee, (I was working on contract).

It was for around £120,000 per year, probably the equivalent of about a quarter of a million pounds sterling today.