[hackermailman]

Where I work we routinely openly disparage each other's skills and work ethic, but keep it jovial without any serious personal attacks or ganging up on one person. Criticism is never taken personally, and you build a culture of friendly competition, and nobody is ever afraid to tell anybody else that their code sucks because everybody has shitty code somewhere, took a short cut to meet a deadline, made a mistake, etc.

In your situation I would've said to the new devs they should be more worried about screwing up my lunch order being so new, and claimed I wrote the terrible code myself instead of selling out the old devs, and that they need to pick up the pace and step up if they want to compete with my 10x skills pushing working product out the door. I would've also nicknamed the loudest critic 'Triple A' from there on in too just like how they nicknamed me when I started and took forever to finish anything.

[probinso]

I suspect that this actually is an enjoyable environment, despite how it reads. I also suspect it is a very successful team. It likely has little diversity in employees. I've been on these teams before, and had a lot of fun in a sea of persons who all have the same cultural and educational background.

This usually works until teams get large, or start to grow diversity

[maps7]

That environment sounds horrible. Something similar is going on where I work now and it's really discouraging and negative.

[leereeves]

Some people love it. I had an uncle who was like that with his coworkers in construction; constantly teasing and criticising (and coworkers giving the same right back). Many people would think they were fighting, but they were the best of friends and enjoyed the repartee.

Some might call it toxic, and it wouldn't be allowed in a corporate environment today, but clearly no environment will please everyone. For them, it was good.

[hackermailman]

True, on paper sounds horrible but it's not done in any kind of vindictive bullying manner or in a jock locker room way. New hires feel more confident communicating instead of panicking and not telling anybody. Code quality attacks like OP described don't come off as personal, so nobody is silently seething because they've been offended. It eliminated all bs notions about work place 'teams' when in reality we're competing with each other every day for more recognition, bonuses, promotions. Everywhere else I worked people did this anyway but behind other's backs, which to me is truly negative and a shitty dysfunctional work environment. The latest new hire said this was the only office where there was no anxiety of coming to work because fucking up wasn't the end of the world anymore.