[spaceywilly]

“ eventually leaving him the only person competent enough to make changes to it”

erm, this makes it sound like he was a not a very good engineer. Your code should always be written so that if you get hit by a bus one day, the rest of your team could pick right up where you left off

[dogecoinbase]

This doesn't sound like something a good engineer would do. I try to work with people competent enough not to walk in front of buses.

[ok_dad]

> I try to work with people competent enough not to walk in front of buses.

Sounds like if you work at Amazon you might choose to walk in front of a bus one day...

[dininski]

Unfortunately this is a quite common scenario in big enterprises, such as Amazon, Google and the lot. Main reason is the promotion process.

Usually you need to gather evidence that you've contributed significantly to a project. And the easiest way to do that is to work on new projects. Maintaining an existing codebase is usually a thankless job, which is also hard to get you promoted.

And once the new project is released it eventually gets abandoned and people move to the next one, which would help them get promoted. Think of all the Google projects that have been discontinued, which were also a product of similar processes.