We fired our top talent—best decision ever.

“You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F***ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.”

And so our resident genius, our Dr. Jekyll, explosively completed his transformation into Mr. Hyde.

He declared this in front of the product design team, developers, management, and pre-launch customers. One of our project sponsors had the temerity to ask when the problem crippling our product would be fixed.

Genius is a fickle beast. Sometimes you have the good fortune to work with a mad genius. Other times you are doomed to work with pure madness. There are also times when it is hard to tell the difference.

This story is about the fall from grace of an extremely gifted team member with a deep understanding of our product’s architecture. He had an uncanny ability to forecast future requirements, and a ton of domain-specific knowledge.
He was our top contributor. He was killing our flagship project.
We’ll call this person “Rick.”