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We Hired a $310,000 Staff Engineer. On His Third Monday, He Asked Us to Delete Six Months of Work
The CTO thought we’d hired someone to finish our biggest engineering project. Instead, he walked into a conference room, erased the architecture diagram, and asked why thirty-seven engineers were building something our customers had never requested.
The meeting started at 9:06 on a Monday morning, and by 9:19, our new Staff Engineer had managed to offend nearly everyone responsible for the company’s most expensive engineering initiative. He hadn’t raised his voice, insulted anyone, or done anything that would justify a conversation with Human Resources. He’d simply stood in front of a whiteboard containing six months of architectural decisions, studied it for an uncomfortable amount of time, and asked whether anybody could explain what problem the system was supposed to solve.
His name was Vincent Hale. We’d hired him three weeks earlier with a total compensation package worth approximately $310,000 a year, which was enough money to make several Senior Engineers suddenly interested in the company’s compensation philosophy. He had previously worked on large-scale infrastructure, knew…
