Don't fire the Tango dancer.

A piece of advice. If you manage an #IT company: Do not fire the Tango dancer.

Back in 2019, #Vidax found itself in a bit of a pinch at the end of a project, and I had to let go of some great people from the team. It's always painful, it happens, but if you are good to your people, it's only a goodbye until the next time you can work with them. 

Here, I faced a difficult decision to make, as I had to choose between 2 front-end designers.

- One was a code-driven perfectionist, who delivered good code that fit specifications to the line.
- The other was the passionate, professional Tango Dancer during his free time, who, as I was told by my team, had less perfect of a code writing and needed more peer reviews and feedback to deliver according to specs.

-- Against my gut feelings, I caved in, listened to the team, fired the Tango Dancer, and followed the "Good code / Specs" road. What could go wrong??

Although I only have respect, and am thankful for this code-driven developer I kept in the team, I came to regret my decision very quickly.

In firing the "loose code Tango Dancer", I had lost a presence in the team, a personality with an aura, and a plethora of soft skills the good code developer did not have.

-- But what about the specs? Oh! The specs, well, who cares about the specs if they do not make sense? The Tango Dancer had the capacity to take a step back, look at the big picture, and not dive into coding and waste the company's time on something that simply would not work. He would report, propose alternatives that often were more elegant and required less coding to do.

-- What about those multiple reviews and asking his colleagues for input? With no shame and no ego, he was able to bring people together to solve a problem he had, a problem that the company had. This app needed to be shipped, and the more communication we would put on it, the better the code, the less the code.

## The junction of art and tech:
The capacity to see the big picture and propose alternatives, the communication skills, the problem-solving mind, the enthusiasm, the constant self-schooling, and embracing new technologies, made the company save on project management (not having to explain every step of the project) and in quality assurance.

## Damn... I saw it too late.

Then, when reviewing days of work that just did not make sense for the project, just to be told "But I coded according to specs...", I would tell myself, and I tell you now, my IT manager friends:

#### Don't fire the Tango Dancer. ####