epic-meltdowns

Here they are. . in no particular order. This is four minus the one manager I mentioned in my initial comments.

1) The company was all about getting out websites as fast as you can. Last year, I think they put out 4,000 websites. It was a crazy environment and you had to keep up. You were given a "goal" each month of how many sites you had to put out. You had to average building 2 sites a day to hit your goal. Didn't hit it? You got put on a PIP (performance improvement plan) and if you went more than two months, they just let you go, it was pretty brutal.

Most developers aren't used to that kind of high pressure stuff, so many only lasted a few months. We had one guy who made it through and was doing fine. Then the "quarterly pushes" started. Goals started getting raised every month. This death march went on for 10 months. Suddenly every month was a "push" to hit our ever increasing numbers. You could start to see this guys cracks after a few months. Constantly complaining, slamming of fists at the desks, and so on. We start a new month, increased goals, a lot of raised voices from the developers. This guy says, "Fuck this, I don't care anymore, I refuse to do this." He goes half the month without getting a single site out and remains completely defiant. The managers finally realize this and sit him down to talk. He relents and says he'll do his best. Manager tells him, "You don't hit your goal, you're done, fired." We found out later he was interviewing trying to get out so he could just quit, but he couldn't find a gig fast enough and was stuck having to hit his goal. Dude basically went two weeks without sleep, like an epic cramming session for a college final. The last weekend I ran into him on a Saturday at the office. Looked like a zombie. Eyes sunken, pale and you could tell he was wore out. The month ends and despite his efforts, he comes up two sites short of his goal - two. The guy put out 20 sites in two weeks! The next day he gets pulled into the managers office. Everybody stands up to see what happens. Everybody thought they would let him slide considering his epic comeback. Nope. Voices start getting louder (these were supposedly noise proof offices, btw) and then you hear a loud crashing and then a huge scream. Turns out, he completely lost it and punched the office door (made almost entirely of glass) and it shattered. Manager screamed, security was called and the funny part is he just turned and walked out of the office and then the building very calmly as security went running by. They finally got him in the parking lot, and by then the local PD was called and showed up. No charges were filed, but that his last day. Sensitivity training was issued for the managers as a result, and the VP had a company wide meeting and said they needed to "make some changes", but nothing ever happened, and nothing was changed.

2) I was contracting and came in on the tail end of this guy's meltdown. He was a front-end developer and was really driven. When he got to the company, he made it his goal to completely rewrite all the front-end code for all five of the company's websites. He was a perfectionist and once he assumed control of the team, the other three developers just stood back and let him dictate what was going to happen. Over the course of two years, I was told he never took a day off (including weekend) and worked an average of 70-80 hours a week perfecting the code on the sites. After a year of this, he basically went full rogue. At the time, both front-end developers and back-end developers were part of the same team. Once he went full rogue, he wouldn't tell anybody what he was doing. The back-end guys would ask him what he was doing and he would just give cryptic replies like, "Oh, just come CSS3 stuff". At one point, he was doing all the development (both front-end and back-end), on VPS servers he was using outside the company's firewall on his personal accounts, so no one could dig around and see what he was up to.  Once they got tired of his answers, they started pressing him, and he would just slam his fists on the table during the middle of the meeting and screa,, "You don't know what the fuck you're doing, I'm in control here!" and get up and walk out of the meeting. Soon, all the developers were walking on egg shells, even the managers treaded lightly around him. They were in a precarious position. This guy controlled all their websites, and the code therein. If they fired him, they had no idea what would happen. Did have some malware he was going to unleash and bring the sites down and no one knew how far into the network he was. He once bragged to someone, "If they fire me, I'll bring down their whole network, I know things no one should." They finally decided to cut the cord and after several months of investigating what he knew, and got him to get all the sites released. Once they were up, they "locked the code down" and made several backups of all the sites, just in case. On the day it was supposed to get fired, he didn't show up. He just called and said he was checking into the hospital for exhaustion and would be in contact. Several days later, the manager got a call from a nurse saying there were transferring him to a psych ward and he would be "incapacitated" for a few months. No heard from him again after that. It was pretty eerie.

3) This actually wasn't a developer, it was a manager of our dev team. This was a large retail corporation and they were hedging their bets on the coming Christmas season to help them overcome the slumping sales figures and bad economy. The project had about a dozen developers on it and we were all cranking as hard as we could. The six weeks before the site release was a crushing time. 60-65 hour weeks, working on the weekends and nobody was allowed vacation. For us, it became a game of trying to figure out who would break first. We had a few guys who wouldn't eat lunch, just sit and bitch about the crappy enviroments or the guys in India checking in bad code which would break the nightly builds. Nobody saw the manager becoming increasingly withdrawn, quiet and short. Our scrums used be relatively long, with everybody talking about what still needed to be done and he was really involved and would take copious notes. He would normally would stop by your desk once or twice a day to check on your progress on your tasks. The last two weeks, he stopped coming to people's desks, and stayed in his office the whole day. He barely spoke to anybody. We never noticed since we were so busy trying to hit our deadlines. The last week of QA and bug fixing was going slow. It looked for a few days like we weren't going to make the late October deadline. As it turns out, we made the deadline and we had high fives all around since nothing major broke post-release. A couple days later, our manager doesn't show up. A few more days, and now rumors start to swirl. Even one of the developers who was good friends with him had no idea what was going on. He hadn't spoken to him since the week before the release. He tried texting and calling to no avail. Finally, we all got an ominous Outlook invite for a meeting that afternoon. NOW everybody is freaking out. We all go, not knowing what's going on. We all file in and notice the director of the department is standing at the front of the auditorium. He then goes on to announce the manager has taken a "leave of absence" for the next two months. Then he explains while he's appreciative of our effort, the department has come under heavy scrutiny and because of some "discrepancies", the whole team was being disolved and we were all being assigned to new teams. Turns out our manager had an epic meltdown, got his entire management team fired along with his director for what happened with the project. We found out later the "discrepancies" he referred to was the double and triple billing the contracting company was doing on the project. Some thought the manager was in on it getting kickbacks, but who knows for sure.

4) While the others have been a sort of slow builds to epic meltdowns, this one was fast and furious. I was working for a company who just went through a huge re-org. They used to have a huge sprawling building with about 600 employees. After the last year, they had lost 30% of their clients, and had to lay off almost 400 people. They had also shuffled through three CEO's in the same time. The day I was brought on as a contractor, the present CEO was celebrating his first full year in charge. To say there was some turbulance was an understatement. It was like working in a ghost town. Half the building was vacant. Tons of offices with plaques half hanging on the walls, desks dusty from nobody using them. Half empty conference rooms with whiteboards with stuff still written on them - it was crazy. The company was also having a hard time keeping anybody. In my short six month stay, we had three full-time people quit and three contractors up and leave within a few weeks. I was about three weeks in when they hired a new contractor. He was a real gem. Thought he knew everything about front-end and back-end development. You couldn't tell him anything and he was constantly uptight about the office, the code, the tools we were using, hated people reviewing his code and so on. He got put on a larger project because of his "expertise" but after a week, you could tell something was wrong. In order to get stuff done, I had to crank the music in my headphones, lest I hear his constant ramblings about, "Why the fuck would you do this?" or "These people have no idea what they're doing!" loud enough so everybody whould hear around him. After two previous heated arguments with my manager, I knew something was about to happen. I started working from home and after I came in the following week, I heard what happened. Turns out, one day he was rambling and someone finally told him to shut the hell up and just do his work. The manager came over and said he should be quiet as he was being disruptive to others. I guess he lost it and said, "Well, then, let me be a little more disruptive then!" and picked up his monitor and attempted to throw it out the nearest window - which unfortunately about ten yards too far for him. After he tossed the monitor, he flug his keyboard and threw his chair in disgust and then he stormed out. The funny part was my manager trying to tell him they'll just keep his paycheck for the cost of a new monitor as he stormed out of the building. Needless to say, they changed all the locks and had to reissue all new key cards to everybody. I only lasted a few more months myself, but it turned into a persistent inside joke around the office.