I fired Edy

And I still regret it

I did not want to fire Edy, yet I did. She was my first hire—it took me soooo looooooong to find her! Countless days of mind-numbing panel interviews with the most awful candidates you could imagine. I couldn’t see working with any of them, never mind managing them. Edy was the only one who seemed human.

But once she came on board, it was obvious she had no idea what she was doing. Even her people skills—that compared to the other candidates seemed stellar—were actually pretty abrasive.

So, the day Edy organized a surprise baby shower for me and JFran, I fired her. I had to do it before her probationary period ended, else I would never have been able to get rid of her.

It was super traumatic. Super duper traumatic. I suppose, in retrospect, it wasn’t so great for Edy either. Perhaps one day I can put together better words then “super duper” to express just how traumatic it was for me. It put me off being a manager for 20 years. Twenty.

While I’m sure there was plenty of blame to go around—myself, my boss, HR—I blame civil service for this catastrophe. Civil service is a broad term for the thicket of bureaucratic process and arcane requirements that govern hiring in the public sector. All the rules glom together, bound by process, forming gigantic thorny tumbleweeds that roll through the hiring maze, blocking you from finding any cheese.

I was running IT for the Dookie District. AKA the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District, AKA Central San, AKA the poop factory. I wrote about some of the characters and shenanigans that went on in that place in Three not-so-wise Monkeys.

The Dookie District is classified as a “special district” which means it straddles the line between a public and private agency. It was the final stop in my journey to shake the stigma of government work and get a job in the private sector.

I remember some of the Dookie Districts civil service requirements: You had to post the job in local and national print publications for four weeks before you could interview. You had to assemble a panel of at least three interviewers and they had to be the same for every candidate, asking the exact same questions in the exact same order regardless of candidate or response. Follow-up questions were not allowed.

As the hiring manager, I couldn’t participate in the interviews! I was a silent member of the panel. Thank god for the probationary period—because once that’s over, it’s exceptionally hard to get rid of someone. Even with the probationary period, I had to write up the Magna Carta on why Edy couldn’t perform the basics of the job, along with a dozen other forms in white, canary, and pink.

Ironically, Civil Service is meant to eliminate cronyism, nepotism, and all the other bad hiring “-isms,” but what it does is make hiring great people nearly impossible.

I wanted to be a boss like MacGregor. I read about him in a business school case study. AE Carlisle wrote this parable about super manager MacGregor. Carlisle was a management professor, and his thing was studying the secrets of leadership. Gawd knows there are a million books on how to be the best manager—I don’t recommend you read them.

MacGregor stuck with me though. The story goes that he ran a big refinery with an autonomous team of empowered managers. His team was so well run that, aside from a handful of standing meetings, MacGregor was completely hands-off and had time to play golf every day. A peer of Carlisle’s stole these concepts and turned them into a book you might have heard of: The One-Minute Manager. Superficial fables, but a lot of people bought that book.

Burned by my short management stint, I took the IC or Individual Contributor track. I figure I reached peak peak IC when I got the title Architect. Me and George Costanza.

Twenty years after Edy, the trauma faded, and I happily made the jump to a brand new group as the boss, building a new team from scratch. I took one guy with me, inherited a guy who’d been holding down the fort, and poached a third guy I knew in an adjunct role across the world in Australia.

Our mighty team of four covered the world. We kept growing. We worked with a sister team in India to cover South and Southeast Asia. Then I hired a guy in London to cover Europe and a guy in Brazil to cover Latin America. We kept growing, so I hired in France, Mexico, Taiwan and Japan to fill the market gaps. Soon it got too much for me to manage, so we split out into multiple regional teams, ultimately growing the team to around 100.

I was a hiring machine. And a promoting machine. My teams did well. I made it up to Edy; I never would’ve hired her. Microsoft’s hiring couldn’t be more different from civil service at the Dookie District.

When I told my boss I was getting out, he threw me a curveball. Would I build a new growth team of developer PMs to seed building Apps on Teams? I had to sleep on that one, but sure I did it, and it was fun. To get geographical coverage, my new team would run US and Europe with a lead in Europe. Our India Timezone team would cover Asia Pacific.

Unexpectedly, I became what I thought was the dream—a manager of managers.

I always figured if the people working for you were managers, and the people working with you were managers, they’d all be mature, competent, and there would be no drama. I’d finally be like MacGregor. FALSE. Peak drama, all the egos—MacGregor is a lie.

Anyway, that’s my story for today. Namaste.