I had to more quickly grow to help fill in the gaps those two had left, and while I did become the model of a very high

Sometimes corporate politics can make work feel like madness if you’re the type who pays attention. I suspect it was a factor when Gary took his leave for personal reasons, with no intention of working elsewhere. Mitch also left not a year after that, with no particular job lined up. It’s a powerful statement when your most talented employees up and quit with no safety net. If that’s not a wake-up call for any company, then their management will slumber indefinitely into oblivion. Or it simply means they have bigger problems.

Shortly after the feature’s success, Gary held an engineering presentation. It was about architecture, namely around object lifecycle, Dependency Inversion, ad-hoc lifetimes versus explicitly scoped objects, the detriments of certain allocation anti-patterns, code coupling preventing unit test coverage, and how it’s all connected to many of our internal engineering problems. The attendees who got it were nonplussed and quite possibly embarrassed, because the critique wasn’t all that flattering to those who had built the company’s intellectual property since nearly the beginning.

Gary’s parting words of advice to me were: “you need to speak up more often”. Looking back to all those hours in the war room, Gary and Mitch being the dominant talkers with superior intellect — they barely gave me a chance to speak sometimes — but when I did say something, it was meaningful, and often was an important point.

By the time he had the feature ready for QA, it looked better than I’d at least imagined, was more performant than we had expected, and it was backed by thousands of unit test assertions. This, in an aging flagship codebase with a complete lack of unit tests. Needless to say, all levels of management were pleased with the long-awaited feature.

The thing about this guy was that he was always right. Not in the argumentative, always has to have the last word kind of way, but more like…the guy knew everything — about everything. I’m proud to have proven him wrong once or twice in total, being a person who tries to get their facts straight before speaking. I’d feel embarrassed for various others in his path who didn’t know something big that they probably should have known, given their job titles are horizontal to Gary’s position.

The thing about human nature is, that nobody likes a smarty-pants. Especially when the gift of enlightenment is often delivered with a lacking of kindness, and sometimes coming off as hostile even. So the general consensus was that this guy was a big meanie — to put it nicely. I don’t believe he enjoyed making people look stupid, despite being really good at it. Rather his sense of what’s normal for a modern software shop was based on experience that was years ahead of ours and yet to be practiced at our company and that must have been frustrating, both for himself and for those around him.

Despite having several years of prior programming experience, the two years I spent on Gary’s team were key in shaping me into what I believe is a healthy baseline for all Senior Developers. This was done by shedding off years-long habits which although common, are also unproductive and sometimes even nasty. We replaced them with discerning deliberation, and of course, using advanced tools and more effective processes. Last but not least, having all the developers’ values aligned is key in having a harmonious team and codebase.

Nearly a decade ago, the Director of Software Development at my employer at the time, hired a Software Engineer III, who we’ll call Gary. We also hired an SE II called Mitch around the same time but we’ll get to that later. For the first few months, Gary was quiet and mostly kept to himself, hard at work on a highly technical feature — air and fluid flow animation in our real-time 3D mechanical training software. A feature that everyone in the company had been pipe-dreaming about for years but never took it on, due to multiple challenges. This was our guy to finally do it.

Based on our interactions, Gary always assumed I was an SE II and when he found out I was “only” an SE I, he was visibly outraged with the upper management. In under three weeks after this discovery, I was given a promotion. Similarly, Mitch had the knowledge and skills of an SE III while only officially being an SE II, but he had to wait a bit longer for his well-deserved title.

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The success of Gary’s technical prowess and championing of a more agile process marked the departure of the very person who hired him. It was a bit of a shock, but the hubbub around that was quickly muffled by exciting new changes. The company was switching up their product offerings and as a result, Mitch, myself, and a new SDET hire were put under Gary’s new team to build something the company had never done before.

Our technical debt was typically bad but wasn’t that bad, certainly not crippling to productivity, but there were large, cringe-worthy portions of our code feared by all, that were obviously a result of the bad patterns Gary had revealed. Imagine opening your eyes to the fact that we were all part of the problem.

Combining my ability to handle any technically difficult task thrown at me, and the fact that Mitch was generally much smarter than I was, Gary was always able to push out more high-quality code than the both of us. This, despite being occupied half of the time in meetings with both vertical and horizontal management, shaping and documenting our new standard processes, or helping and mentoring us. I’m still not sure how he managed this level of productivity with so little time, as he ensured nobody on our team was putting in after-hours work, including himself.

What we produced was an application with virtually no defects, was very performant, was easily extendible, and was later reused in other future projects. In many ways, it was one of the biggest technical successes I’ve witnessed from start to finish.

At times, Mitch and Gary were like two peas in a pod. I remember the countless hours spent in the war room brainstorming the architectural design for our new product, which is when I really saw how far ahead of me they both were. There were many lengths of time when it seemed they were speaking an exclusive language. Despite never having worked together in the past, they were both agreeing about modern programming concepts not yet taught at our company. At first, it was annoying how much they liked to talk, but in the end, when the talking was over there was nothing left to do but code — and do so very effectively.