On the extremes of radical new management (part 1)

The early days of my career were spent with a small struggling software company competing in a challenging market mostly dominated by much larger players.  Our company had a different vision, some very talented people and culture of taking raw talent and honing it through collaboration and mentoring.

We had a development lead - let's call him Dave to protect his true identity as everyone knows 3 or 4 Daves.  Dave was an unassuming genius who loved what he did and always had time for others. Within a couple of years of professional development, I had seen Dave perform some extraordinary feats of technical mastery and I aspired to be just like him.  I thought I was getting pretty good at what I did, but Dave was the guy that all the devs looked up to and relied on when things broke in ways that no one else could fix.

Then a strange thing happened...

Our struggling company had been struggling for too long - the venture capital firm wanted some of their money back and we were insolvent. The company went into administration (I didn't even know what that meant at the time - but hey, I'd picked a career in software, so you live and learn).  We were bought out by another company who operated in slightly different market space but saw 'opportunities and synergies' between our organisations.

In a 'management by numbers' style, our new owners 'interviewed' many of the staff to find out how things worked, what people thought were the key problems,  who were the key people in the business and why. It came as no shock to anyone that Dave came out as the most respected individual in the business. His efforts had singlehandedly saved product deals and possibly the company itself on several occasions.

Being a forward thinking and progressive company, our new owners recognised the importance of the qualities that Dave bled into the business. They freed up a couple of days a week of Dave's time and put him at the heart of a programmer mentoring and development initiative with the goal of quickly up-skilling a new group of "Dave-a-likes" to safeguard the future of the business, improve the quality of our products and accelerate our delivery pace.

Oh sorry - no they didn't do that did they.  They fired him / let him go / "allowed him to to seek a fresh opportunity elsewhere". Almost without warning we went from having a Dave to not having a Dave.  The wisdom that I heard on the company grapevine was along the lines of "anyone who commands that amount of respect within a business is a single point of failure and too dangerous to have around."  To the casual observer, this masterstroke looked a lot more like "kill the big dog so that the rest of the pack can be more easily controlled."

Many of you may have worked in an organisation where a new 'leader' joins and within the first week executes some form of bizarre territory marking gesture that dumbfounds everyone.  I'll hypothesise on the reasons in part 2.

This particular action was made all the more strange because:

• Dave was a thoroughly decent, kind, placid, non-threatening and very capable guy - he was not a big aggressive Rottweiler, he was more a well loved Collie with skills and abilities in bucket loads.
• The company was not drowning in developers, let alone rock star developers
• They didn't pay great wages, so there was no huge cost saving to be made
• There was no shortage of projects in the pipeline
• There was nobody left with feet big enough to properly fill Dave's shoes.

The company was halved in size in a little over 2 days.  For a while I had survivors guilt - as one of the more recent employees, I was expecting to be one of the first out, but perhaps my modest salary and modest ability made me worth keeping, and I was invited to stay.  I stayed.  I still loved the work, was still learning a lot and, at the time, had just got my first mortgage and did not want the worry of being back in the job market.

Of the friends that did not survive the cut, the vast majority went onto bigger and better things, and many may look back now and see being made redundant as one of the best things that happened to their career.

Over the following 20 years, I've seen a few management masterstrokes, and without being privy to the discussions that lead to them, I have on occasion tried to rationalise the oddity with possible explanations - and  in part 2, I'll document some of my thoughts.