| I've seen this over and over too. Put a Non-technical VP/Manager in charge. Maybe someone who started out as a UI designer or non technical PM and then somehow became VP of engineering because they were an early loyal employee. Charismatic coders will take advantage and the manager will eat it up. The "rock stars" commit tons of code put create massive tech debt. They write their own buggy versions of stuff they should have just imported industry standard OSS versions of. Rule evaluation engines, broken file formats, broken home grown encryption, broken distributed job systems, heavily broken home grown DB frameworks. They'll have a huge bias towards terse code that doesn't make a lot of sense. Abuse of functional code. Everything is the opposite of KISS. Everyone else on the team is just constantly fixing their showstopper level bugs, of which there are always many. They talk a good game and management constantly thinks the rock star is super smart and the rest of the team is deficient. Then the tech debt reaches ridiculous levels, or you get bought and different management comes in and sees right through it. Managers get let go, new managers don't buy the rock star story. Rock star gets frustrated, leaves for another company where they can pull the same trick, and puts all this inflated stuff on the resume that they wrote all this stuff they shouldn't have written. A new naive manager falls for it think they must be really smart cause they're never going to find out how broken all the stuff was. All this is WAY easier for a rock start to pull off post around 2010 because the office culture in tech has become so PC that no one can be blamed for anything. Lots of stuff that used to get someone shown the door in my early career would not even get called out today at all. |