He decided to go.
He’s my best friend from college. I convinced him to join the startup I was at and he built a major component of the system with his skills in C++. After about two years he left for a job in a different country, working on computer graphics for movies. His code was a beauty with proper use of templating and abstractions, making my life easy when I drew out the entire system on paper to understand what he accomplished.
We had to find a replacement, someone who could take over since my friend was the lead for a technically complex portion of the system. This project in C++ could filter text streams in real-time meaning our latency was in milliseconds. That’s fast or slow depending on your use case. We were filtering social media tweets so that met our requirements.
We looked for awhile and hired a new engineer to take on this system. We liked him and he was very interested in what we were doing. I’ll admit in the beginning, the working relationship felt rough. I held the new engineer to what I thought he should be doing which was my friend’s responsibilities. I was too harsh and did not mentor him properly to pick up the system.
Over time I understood I can’t replace my friend instantly with this new hire. His experiences aren’t a perfect mirror of my friend’s career. He didn’t write the original system and he needed time to absorb the context. My initial expectations were unrealistic.
I later discovered he excelled in a specific area like delivering presentations for technically complex systems – he could explain and get others excited about the filtering system better than my friend ever could. We were fortunate to have his skills on hand when we were going through due diligence.
After the exit of the startup, this new engineer would become one of my good friends. Through the closing of the company and onwards, he would be there being a good listener through difficult times. For that I truly appreciated his advice and guidance on many situations. We still get coffee weekly to talk about the old days and the future. If you’re in San Francisco, maybe you’ll see the two of us laughing about something silly I did in the previous company.
Never expect a replacement to be a clone of the previous one. Be pleasantly surprised when the new hire offers new skills your team can greatly benefit from. Be willing to train and mentor them. Help them grow into their predecessor’s role, and then beyond.
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