[bredren]

I had a “hostage taker” running devops and CI on a project last year that I had warned the product owner about multiple times.

This person would not respond to basic developer experience problems and could not get a release out the door without some manner of basic code merging problems.

Repeated direct and polite feedback would not move them an inch. It was like they knew they didn’t have to change and could keep their job.

The manager should have been able to identify this and handle it but they were distracted and not able to do it.

Eventually this hostage taker‘a failure to execute and complete sandbagging of any attempt to wrest control over deployments endangered a major new enterprise sale.

We went around this person, rebuilt what they had been responsible for and got back to work completing the product.

They were sidelined and let go eventually and the project is way better for it.