I Lost a Brilliant Engineer

One of our customers, a large call center, challenged us with developing a noise cancellation app that runs directly on their agents' computers, provides real-time speech-to-text transcribing, and leverages AI to ensure the agents follow the company's customer service talk tracks.

My engineers were already busy working on defects and implementing new feature requests for our AI platform, Symbient.ai, and our other products too.

Thankfully, we had someone from the outside willing to jump in to work on the noise cancellation app.

This app isn't trivial. There's a lot that went into it. Because of that, it took the developer longer than expected to deliver. He kept hitting bumps along the way, bumps that delayed the delivery date we promised our customer.

As with any business, delivering on time is hugely important. Not just delivering on time, but also delivering on expectations.

Delivery of the product kept getting pushed back as the customer grew impatient. To prevent further delay, I personally took over the development of the app and asked the engineer to assist in other areas he was well suited for.

Fast forward - I learned that the engineer had deployed the source code for some of our other apps on another company's servers where he was working on things like automated testing and CI/CD. Due to obvious reasons, I asked him to remove our technologies from those other servers and spun up new servers in our environment for him to use instead.

I wasn't mean about any of it. I didn't get an attitude or act like a boss. I was polite & professional about it, and even explained why we can't have our intellectual property installed on another company's hardware.

The combination of me pulling the engineer from the noise cancellation project and asking him to remove our technology from unapproved hardware caused the engineer to resign. No notice. No explanation. Just a text message with his resignation.

From my perspective, I was only doing what I thought best for the company. It wasn't personal. It was just business. Plus, like I said, he was/is a brilliant engineer. Unfortunately, he resigned anyways.

This post isn't to justify my decisions (or his). It is to simply share real-world issues that many companies face, but most aren't willing to talk about - at least not publicly.

#LucusLabs #BusinessDecisions #Leadership #WorkplaceCulture #LeadershipLessons #Management #BusinessChallenges