The peril of Stevie Cheeseburgers, or how to evaluate supposed “A-Players”

I used to work at this place called FireMon, which does cyber security, for part of 2018. At the time I got this job, it was pretty exciting because I was dead broke for a lot of the end of 2017, and this represented a new hope. Plus: the CEO personally did one of the final interviews, and I thought that was cool. Once I started, it was largely a comedy of errors. We hired a CMO who had a “five-year plan.” He left after 10 months. He regularly called meetings about “sales-marketing dynamics,” then would let sales just not attend. If someone questioned him, he’d say “I need them working the phones, not sitting in dumb meetings.” (Um, you called this meeting.)

So there was a dude there named Steve. He was a little pudgy, so people that didn’t like him — as you see in offices — called him “Stevie Cheeseburgers.” It’s mean, but also funny. The executives loved this guy because he sold. He was always over-quota. There was a guy in Germany who was also always over-quota, but Stevie Cheeseburgers was the only guy in North America who was. He was revered.

You know the title we assign these people: A-Players.

But there was something interesting about Stevie Cheeseburgers, that I recently thought of in a Medium comments thread. He was a big, boisterous guy and he demanded what…