How one company ignored their biggest hero, and he saved the day anyways.

I learned a great lesson today from a friend.  He was giving me some specific career advice. As a side note, he mentioned that it is always important to know the full capabilities of your entire team.

Tom had been hired to do a specific thing on the development team he works on, and everyone see's him as the expert for that thing. Not too long ago, they ran into a database issue that was negatively impacting one of their largest clients. Database configuration was not why they hired Tom. As the experts were troubleshooting ideas, Tom kept getting shut down because he was not the resident expert. 

Little did anyone know, Tom actually was the team lead at Microsoft for building MS Access, and knows more about database infrastructure than almost anyone else. So when all the so called "experts" were expanding server size in attempt to solve the problems, Tom jumped into the production server, tweaked some code, and reduced the inefficiencies by 60x in less than 10 minutes.

When he showed them, everyone freaked out. It got pushed live immediately and the problem was solved. 

Unfortunately, the problem could have been solved much sooner, and without rallying the entire company into a frenzy.

Lesson #1 Learned: Get to know your team. Not just for why you hired them, but know all of their strengths.

Here is the sad part of the story. The team did not know this about Tom because he intentionally left it off his resume. His experience at Microsoft building Access, and their framework for creating efficiencies for 55,000 programmers made him look "Over Qualified". Nobody would hire him in Utah. They assumed he wanted bigger challenges than what he got at MS. So Tom took all that off his resume and in his own words, "Dummied it down", and started getting job offers for the jobs he wanted. But nobody knew the diamond they had. What motivates Tom is building cool stuff, no matter how big or small. But everyone else projected their own motivations onto him when screening and interviewing.

Lesson #2 Learned: Overqualified does not = bad fit. If an amazing person wants to work for you, but they look too good to be true - find out the story. Don't project stereotypes or your own ambitions onto those you are interviewing or the resumes you are reading. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised.