Botond Béres
Sep 5, 2018 · 1 min read

I think this is first and foremost a management problem. Rick should never have been allowed to continue on like that, not for months but years?

Building everything from scratch especially is an egregious error that he should not have gotten away with if there was some technical oversight.

Also if his code was unreadable, unmaintainable, undocumented, untested then he wasn’t at all that skilled in the first place as everyone (and himself) seemed to think. For a top performer those are expected and are part of the measure of skill. The “Not Invented Here Syndrome” + the lack of those attributes classify him in my eyes as a type of bad programmer with a big ego with net negative or very low productivity in the long run.

Programming skill is not just measured in how much complex code you can churn out but how clean, readable and tested/reliable it is. Those attributes are crucial, not optional.