“Vibes off, I’m out”

As I reflect on my dev career, I often think about the best people I have worked with and what made them the best.

One of the most talented devs I know has a knack for understanding when an organization’s people or structure made it impossible to do what they hired him for. He was great at making this clear, and quickly escalating a message as high as he could go, with clear explanations for why he thought the way he did.

To some, this made him a problem or threat. In the faux-polite Pacific Northwest, this kind of speaking up often made him a target, and people would start nit-picking on some of his quirks (like taking breaks to have a private dance session in the parking garage, coming back a bit sweaty, but always ready for the next thing). I learned to appreciate his sense, and followed him to work at a few different jobs. On at least three occasions, I saw him predict exactly what would happen within the first six weeks, and then check out mentally within three months as there was no sense of being able to do anything to change the fate that he forecasted.

He wasn’t the easiest guy to work with, but in the 10+ years that I have known him, he has always been right in his assessments. Few companies I have seen these days are really able to handle people outside a narrow box of “deliver code on time”.

There are far more important things to interview for than the ability to crank out “leetcode” answers.

Maybe some of the “silent quitting” is this, but expressed in the passive millennial way of checking out rather than confrontation?