[throwaway777555]

This sounds a lot like my current situation at work. We're a decently-sized company of 100+ people. About a quarter of them are developers. Developers are divided into teams who are responsible for specific components of our system.

However, there are also a few "architects" who are basically free agents with god-like status. They don't architect anything. Rather, they do a lot of counter-productive things such as attending meetings for specific teams without those teams knowing. Then they make large decisions about the direction of a given feature without documenting anything, let alone letting those teams in on what's going on. It's always a fun surprise and works wonders for our ability to deliver a solution on time /s

Beyond that, they'll go off and develop whatever they feel like and force it through the system. We have a code review process, but if you bring up that problems are present in their code, they will often say that it doesn't matter and that the code just has to go through to meet some unspecified deadlines. They'll get management to skip code reviews if you try to hold them accountable. And of course, this results in things exploding. But then they can clean up those exploded bits, knowing what they were, and come out heroically since they "put out so many fires".

I'll stop ranting. But it really is frustrating, especially when you get shut down by management for bringing up any issues with this chaotic group.

[shrimpx]

Sounds like every startup ever.