That Gut Feeling Is Usually Right

In projects and collaborations, people sometimes give off strange signals — red flags. When you detect a subtle unpleasantness or oddness at first impression, that gut feeling is usually right. This time was no different.

The seed of the trouble was my resolve to “soothe things over and carry the team anyway,” out of regard for the mutual connection who had introduced us.

A hackathon floor demands an extreme outpouring of time and energy. Each teammate’s role must be clear. But one person, unable to lay a single finger on the heart of the service — the logic, the database, the cloud infrastructure — obsessed to a bizarre degree over the outwardly visible “logo” and “cosmetic details.” Without producing even the minimum documentation for collaboration, they merely fouled the team’s atmosphere with backbiting and obstruction. And as if that weren’t enough, they spent the entire event voicing absurd complaints about the event itself… a portrait filled with nothing but grievance.

The emptier a person is, the harder they cling to the shell that is immediately visible. It is the easiest domain in which to sustain the self-consoling delusion that they are contributing greatly to the project.

In the end I had no choice but to fold the whole board. I had done all of the coding alone from start to finish anyway, and the web domain, the cloud infrastructure setup, the repository — every asset was under my name. There was not one percent of a reason to hand over results soaked in my sweat for free. I cleanly reclaimed every system and every line of code and walked out.

And so the project ended.

What remained in their hands, I didn’t need to check to know. An empty screen that wouldn’t even run, and that one logo image file they had so obsessed over.

The lessons from this episode are clear.

1. Trust the first instinct, unconditionally. Never suppress your own gut feeling because of someone’s introduction or a relationship.

2. The quiet power of technical independence. When I hold overwhelming control from frontend to backend to infrastructure, an unproductive relationship can be severed with a single stroke.

The moment this bout of bad luck ended, a clean outsourcing project came in as if on cue. Only when you boldly cut away needless noise and bad energy does the space fill with genuinely valuable work. There is no energy to spare for useless people. Now I simply walk straight ahead, calmly, toward my real goals again.