>Can abyone see why this guy was let go?

LOL times about 6. Thank you for the laughs.

When I wandered into this profession i was fortunate enough to find a mentor. Not exactly found; it was a small software company and we were inevitably thrown together. He never complained about it, although he certainly could have. He taught me principles that still guide me as a developer more than 3 decades later. The main one was do things the right way, not necessarily the fastest way. Don't do hacks. Don't cut corners. Do it right. I may not always live up to Jim's standards but I come as close as I can.

We had a coworker who was the antithesis of Yoda's principles. (One of the young guys gave him that nickname). He was a walking hackathon. We issued periodic upgrades to customers and all of us developers, all about 5 of us, were given copies of the code changes. There was one that had us rolling in the aisles. He changed a vendor archiving program in a way that reduced the run time from 30 seconds to 7 seconds according to his tests. The immediate head scratcher was that the program ran only once a week. What are our customers going to do with those 23 saved seconds?! What made us laugh was the way he did it. He stored intermediate results in an array which due to the intracies of assembly language and the footprint of that particular program limited the array size to 1000 vendors. "That should be plenty," he said when Yoda called him on the phone. He had massive seniority over both of us so into the code it went. Yoda still had a look of bemused incredulity about it. "He's introduced a limit that didn't exist!"