[MisterBastahrd]

One needs to be careful of that term in general.

Once upon a time, I was tasked with creating a new social media api based off of existing work by our "rockstar engineer." This is a guy who spend every single free second reading Code Complete and Code and Programming Pearls and seemed to have injected Design Patterns directly into his veins.

The last time he created a new API based off of his existing work, it took him about 2 days. I had zero experience with it, so it took me a little over 3. He was a person who was very proud of his work and declared that there was no reason for me to take that long to implement the new code.

The code review process at the company has a lot to be desired, and he being the "rockstar," basically got his code handwaved through by our CTO, who was filling in as our last manager had taken another position. Deciding I had enough, I went to the new manager who had no inkling of this dev's reputation and asked him to code review the original commit to the base social API with me for real this time. I asked him to keep in mind that other devs were going to have to build their work based off of this base system. It was a convoluted, entirely over-engineered pile of crap. A wankfest masquerading as code.

See, I read and was familiar with all of the books that sat proudly displayed in his cubicle. But there's a time and a place for everything, and the only 10x about this guy was the amount of unnecessary code he produced in order to do something as simple as interfacing with Facebook.