A Diamond in the Rough

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop and Work Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season where we're looking at mistakes and what we learned from them, how they were steps into something better. How the failures led to our success. This episode is going to be a little bit different because it's not so much focused on a mistake, but something that did not look good, that was one of these things that you think you're going to go into it and it's not going to end well. And it actually did for, I think, about everybody involved. Now in this situation, this goes back a few years, so it is a little bit hazy after all this time. The general setup is that I was managing a small team in a big company and there were four or five other peers of mine that we essentially, we sort of shared resources, we sort of shared team members. So depending on what project we were working on at a given time, you would have different people working for you. It was sort of like having a pool of employees and they would work for you based on skill sets. So if you had, like for example, I had certain people I worked well with and I also tended to continue to get projects that were well suitable for those resources. And depending on which projects that you could land and that you got assigned, it sort of affected also the size of your team and obviously the makeup of it. Well in this group, and it's not super small, we're probably talking, I don't remember, maybe 80 to 100 people that made up the teams and then half dozen that were the manager types. And so you also got to, if you were a team member, you got to bounce around and get to know different people and work in different environments. Well there's one guy, which is, just to get into the main part of the story, who was not well liked, we'll just say. And it was a little bit because he had a, he could be a little bit brash, he had a big If you think of like a typical, almost an archetypical New Yorker type, you know, if somebody is, or maybe even Chicago or something like that, you know, some of that big personality, somebody that's just, you know, bull in a China shop all the time. And that didn't sit well with some people. But he also spoke his mind and that didn't sit well with people. And he had no problem telling people what he thought of him, which gave some people issues. So he wasn't the most personable person to deal with. It's one of those kinds of people that he was good. Technically he was skilled, but for that part, you're happy to have him on the team. But beyond that, you're like, ah, I'd also rather work harder than deal with this person. At least that was what was sold to me from the people that I worked with and even some of the people on my team that I trusted. What got to the point where because he was not that popular, it was basically, he sort of got pushed to me. It was essentially, it was actually sort of, the more it was spelled out to me that he was at a point where he had burned some bridges, had gotten in, you know, gotten some people that he'd rubbed the wrong way. I don't remember if it was officially, if he'd done anything, or I think it was more personal personality issues. And it basically got to the point where they said, well, if he can't work with you, Rob, then we're probably just going to go ahead and lay him off. And we'll find somewhere else for him to go because he's just not going to work. And I said, great. That sounds like exactly the kind of person I need on my team is somebody that's probably going to be said slash thought this, you know, it's going to be probably a lot of work. I'm going to have to do a lot of hand holding. I'm going to have to deal with a lot of inner team issues and squabbles and all that kind of stuff. And then just hope that this guy turns it around. And I had several people that essentially told me the same thing. It was like, it's just not somebody anybody wants to work with. And even my boss at the time, who's fairly gracious and he tends to give grace out very easily and it's pretty easy going and is quick to give people second and third chances, which is why this guy ended up with me. Even my boss was sort of like, I just don't know if this is going to, you know, this is salvageable, but hey, maybe you can pull it off. The fact checkers essentially were saying, yeah, this guy's not great. You know, the majority opinion was this is not somebody that you're going to want on your team. You're going to, we're just like letting you be the last guy to take a shot at it before we send them out the door. Now that very well could be something. There's a lot of opportunities for mistakes in here as well because it, you have a bar set really low. I don't know how obvious it was to him, but I think it was to some extent that he, he just, he didn't, he wasn't giving, being given any more chances after that. So he sort of could have easily said, forget it, I'm done. I've worked with all these people for whatever reason it's not working. I'm just going to write off on this on set or something like that. He didn't. Myself, I could have easily said, everybody agrees this guy's no good. Let him write off the sunset or let him give enough rope to hang himself or however you want to look at it and get them off the plate, get them out of the team. The thing that worked that is the key in all of this is that we all decided that we were going to try to make it work. And when I say we, it's not just me and the one guy, it was me and there were members on my team that had. Pass with this person that were not good, that had gotten into fights with them. And I don't, I don't think physical fights, but loud arguments and things like that. And we're not, they were not pleased to know that he was coming to our team. But I said, you know, before we even, for this guy even came in, I said, look, this guy's coming in the team. This is sort of the situation. Nobody else seems to want to deal with him. He's actually fairly talented. us quite a bit and we're going to give him a chance. And I would like, I would appreciate it if you guys on my team would give him a chance. And they said, you know what? Okay. Cause they had to agree that he, he could do skill wise, work wise, technon, technically wise, he could do the job and do it very well. And so they said, okay, it's just one of those that, you know, if this works out, then this could be really good. And so we bring them on to the team and introduced them and he knew half the team or more anyways, but went through introductions and he was, he was, he was nice, which is, you know, it wasn't surprising. He could be at times. It's just, you know, one of those people that once they get a little bit of stress, then they turn into a whole different person. And we started working. And all through this, this is over now, you know, start working together and do this over weeks and now months go by. And throughout there was always, because everybody told me that this guy's got a short fuse and all this kind of stuff that I was always keeping an eye out when we were having conversations, you know, whether it's he and I, or whether it was team environment or whatever it was to see if we were crossing a line somewhere where he was going to start exploding or showing some, some behavior, nonprofessional behavior. Interesting thing, it never happened. I never had at all a situation where he, you know, if you say lost it or that he got overly agitated. There are a couple of times that we had things where it was, it was agitating, but we would talk about it and say, here's what it is. Here's what the options are. And it worked fine. And the moral of this story, because it turned out to be a great one, he was a, you could almost say a diamond in the rough, but it wasn't that rough. I mean, it was like a pretty obvious diamond that all you had to do was pick it up and work with it. Maybe the cut wasn't right or whatever it was, but he did turn out to be a huge benefit to our team. It was a skill set that we were lacking that probably would have taken two or three other people to fill that slot otherwise. And then there's two or three other people, which means you got more communication. You got more, it's just a lot easier to have one person instead of have a small team to do the work, particularly for the kind of stuff that we were working with. And so we win. We get a team member. What's even better? We get a team member. Nobody else wants. So we had this great resource that nobody was going to try to like, you know, quote, steal from us. And so now we've got a foundation that helped us build the team even further and bring on some other projects that otherwise we would have been challenged to do. And although things start going south for the main company and they started changing stuff around, if there hadn't been the essentially the reorg that they did, then I think we would have ended up sort of absorbing almost all of the other teams and a lot of the other projects because we had, we sort of got like a, you know, a good wind behind us as far as some of these projects. And then we were just starting to crank stuff out. So it was one of those that you go with the hot hand. That was us for a while. And it was because of partially. And the whole team was great, but partially adding this guy in was one of those things that like that was a catalyst we needed. The interesting thing, all this I want to swing back around to is that I never had a problem with him after the company reorg and we all went off our different ways. I talked to him for years, probably five, six years later. I would still occasionally get a call from him and he would use me as a reference and we'd talk about career paths and stuff. And he was, he's about my age. I can't remember maybe a couple of years younger, a couple of years older, but I mean, it was this is somebody that wasn't like some young kid looking for some mentor. This is somebody that was an accomplished, was accomplished in his career and was looking for sometimes peers to bounce ideas off of and stuff like that. So we ended up having a great relationship out of all of this that we, you know, there's a lot of professional respect. And I think more importantly in that there was one person in particular on our team that had gotten into it with this guy. And it really from my, and I wasn't there at the time, but the under getting the story from both sides of that argument was it was just total lack of respect from both of them. But on our team, they basically both decided that, you know, okay, we're going to give each other another chance. And they didn't have, they were both sort of worried about it. The guy that was already on my team, more so the guy that we were adding and they never had any problem either. There was never a fight. There was never an argument. There was never any tension really outside of that. I mean, initially there was a little bit because it's like, uh-oh, is this going to be bad? And then it didn't take too long before we realized, no, it's not going to be bad at all. It's fine. And so I had more than a couple of lessons that came out of this one. One is that people are unique. You are unique. I'm unique. We're all alike in that we are different and unique. And when you move people around, whether it's yourself going to a job or whether you're working for somebody different in a job or somebody, you know, you get a new coworker or whatever it is, all of that uniqueness, that unique makeup of people creates a team that is unique. And so you can have situations where people are a very good fit and do very well, but you could also have situations where they are a very bad fit and do horribly. And it really comes down to the environment, the chemistry of the team and things like that. And you can see this in sports and other areas where people are much more, it's much easier to have a metric or a grading system for them. And you'll see that they do really bad in one place and then they do really good somewhere else or vice versa. And sometimes it has to do with age and attitude and all kinds of, there's so many things that go into it. But sometimes it's just almost chemistry. It's who you're working with. And so with this one, with this almost, it could have been a mistake. There were, I would say 90% of the people that I polled, that I talked to, would swear up and down this guy was not a good team player and would have bet solid money that it wasn't going to work out. And these are people that I respected. They're not idiots or anything like that. They had valid reasons for all of this, but they ended up being wrong. And I think in our world of perceptions, when you've got a lot of people leaning one way, it's really hard to not just go with them. And if you want to see this kind of a situation over and over again, read biographies and autobiographies and stories of, from and about entrepreneurs that are particularly those that had some great product idea and it went nuts. It went gangbusters. They made their fortune on that product because almost every time what you're going to hear is everybody told them no. They were told over and over again they were going to fail. Sometimes that was the motivation. If everybody tells me I'm going to fail, that is the thing I'm going to go do because I'm going to prove that no, everybody else may fail, but I won't. But sometimes it's because that person, that entrepreneur, that spark, whoever that person is sees the possibilities. They see the opportunities as opposed to all of the strikes against it. If you lay out pros and cons, there's only a couple of pros and there's a lot in the cons column. But sometimes it's worth it to get those couple of, whatever those pros are, it's worth it. Or maybe you can find ways to negate some of those cons. There are different ways to approach such things. And so while we will talk in other episodes about perception and how you can be blinded things or your point of view is not reality, there's a little bit of that, and I think in this situation, but it's a little bit more so because of personalities. It is worth it to take the time, in some cases, for example this one, and get beyond your initial read on something or what you assume somebody's thinking or how they're acting or why they're doing it or even what they're, how they are communicating to you. Because I think some of this, going back and looking at working with this guy and then looking at how he said stuff and then looking at other people and what they complained about, I think someone was just communication. It was almost literally down to his body language and tone and even probably word selection and things like that that was not intended to be anything other than just black and white communicating information or not in nature data. And the way he did it was not read that way. And so instead of it seeming, him trying to just end black and white, just factually lay it out, it was seen as him being cold or mean or uncaring or there's all these other different things. And it's not like it's, it's not the case where it was just one person that just misread it. It was a large number. So you can't just dismiss it as, oh well they were overly sensitive or something like that. There's obviously more to it. It's not that simple. And maybe it never is. But what I wanted to get at for this episode in particular is the idea that really you need to verify things on your own sometimes. You can have trusted sources. You can have friends, you can have family, you can have people that you trust and they can tell you something and it may still not be 100% true for you. They don't want to do this too much because it's very helpful to learn from other people's experience and not have to go through the same pain and suffer consequences they had to suffer. However there are times where it's worth it to take that risk or to spend that extra time and validate something for yourself as opposed to just going off of what you're told. It's sort of like being an academic. If you go to a school from an early child and everything about your world around you has been taught to you by a teacher, that's not the same as going out and experiencing it. And there's some great movies and stories that have over the last, I guess forever, over the years and the decades and the centuries, there are stories out there of that kind of situation. Sometimes it's fictional, sometimes it's not, but the rough story is some child may be born in a bubble or raised in a bubble or something like that. So they don't get out, they don't see outside and they have this academic concept of how things go because they've been taught it and they have somebody that they trust and it wasn't wrong necessarily what they were taught, but it also wasn't complete. They weren't able to get the, because they didn't have that experience, there were some things that they were missing and it's not until you go out and experience it that suddenly you can, for lack of a better term, own that knowledge and be able to apply it a little better because the application sometimes needs that real world touch in order to do it. So don't underestimate those that you work with. Don't underestimate yourself. We'll come back to that one a couple of times too, I'm sure. You got to go into some of these things and sometimes it's going to take a little work, but if you go at it with a, okay, I'm going to try to make it work kind of attitude, it can make all the difference and if you can get others to adopt that same, okay, we're going to, it's everybody together, we're going to pull together, we're going to make this work, it's amazing what can happen out of that. And so while this wasn't really as much a mistake, I guess, or at least not one that I made, it was, there were definitely a lot of opportunities where it could have been and I think there could have been some very bad ones. We could have had somebody that was a very good employee that we could have ticked off or sent them home or fired them or whatever and that would not have been good at all because you don't want to get rid of good workers and if you're a good worker that doesn't help you to be fired. It obviously would not help your self-esteem and other things and so there's just a lot of stuff that could have gone wrong here and I think we just dodged a bullet in this case. That being said, I think it's time to dodge the bullet of this going over lead long and wrapping this one up. So we will come back, we've got plenty more, there are lots of mistakes and errors out there to go over and even potential mistakes and errors of course. So as always, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Noor Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. One more thing before you go, Develop-a-Noor Podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. 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