Grow or Go

I was working at a 50 person startup. One of the old guard, Tom, was my team lead. He was grumpy all the time. His pull-request comments were passive aggressive and pouty. His mentorship was non-existent. He’d abruptly answer questions, but was clearly more interested in his own stuff. He was a bit toxic to work with.

My coworkers and I were confused. We’d been told by management and other senior devs that Tom was great. He was a founding engineer at the company, fun to grab a drink with, lots of potential. During my time there, Tom only got more sullen and difficult. Something had to give.

Tom was a jack-of-all trades developer–a seed startup’s dream. He’d helped architect the company’s MVP, had written the first version of the mobile app, and had committed most of the code for the various backend systems that made things work. But as the company grew, new engineers were hired that were specialists in each area. Tom needed to let go and pick an area of the company to grow into, but couldn’t. To him, each new senior dev was an interloper, someone who was taking away one of his creations. Tom was unhappy with the way things were going and he made it known.

Management was blindly loyal to Tom. He was one of their first engineers, so they ignored the issue. They gave him many chances to improve his attitude. They explained away his bad behavior. Things got worse. Tom’s toxicity caused several people to leave the company after less than six months. Tom eventually quit soon after that.

I’ve worked at a few companies that had this problem. All of them either failed or remained stagnant, never growing beyond the technical reach of their do-everything engineers. The fix is for the founders to do what’s best for the company. Tom needs to grow or go.