Absolute sadness.
Anyways, story is we hired a lead architect with the promise that he would, in fact, architect things.
This was around 4 months ago.
He quickly saw our systems internals and had a hearty laugh. For awhile, he was serious about working to refactor our entire back end code base into something more streamlined.
Anyways, he got stuck on a project to rewrite a very difficult/feature heavy custom window in silverlight/xaml/vb to html/js/css.
There were basically no requirements, not until they were well into the project, and they kept changing/being discovered as it went on.
He was not content with just using whatever baseline client side and server side architecture that existed, so he attempted to circumvent it as much as possible, instead using as many modern web dev patterns as he could (with the frameworks we had available....durandal stack)
Anyways, all along the way his opinion of our existing architecture was quite public, and of course our tenured, 10+ yr technical director and other lead architect heard about this, and they began belly aching to management, to him (even belittling him at times ffs), and created an environment where they basically tried to prevent him from doing things the right way as much as possible.
Finally time comes for him to show off his work, and it basically just isn't there/doesn't work because of all the shit that is required and the gross negligence on the side of our product managers/dev managers.
I was not there for the meeting, but apparently at one point our VP of SE called him into his office and told him that if he didn't finish it up in xx weeks, he might just get fired/let go.
So this guy, who was promised gold and given shit, who TRIED to live up to his title and architect, who was given a dead-end project with no requirements and impossible dead lines, is now told he has to FINISH IT UP in a hostile environment with the threat of being fired looming overhead.
It is no surprise to me that he left, but he was an incredibly good developer and resource.
I am beyond pissed off at the entire department right now, but can't really vent as most of this knowledge I have, I have privately/in confidence.
shit sucks man
anyways, there you have it. HERP DERP HIRE LEAD ARCHITECT AND MAKE HIM DO THE JOB OF A JUNIOR DEV. Great investment.
This post was edited by Eep on Aug 2 2016 06:17pm