[combatentropy]

The headline uses the words "top" and "talent" in unconventional ways.

When the writer examined Rick's code, it is revealed as messy, buggy, and long-winded --- "a lot of copy pasta", laden with "thousands of hours of technical debt", "bells and whistles", and speculative programming for requirements needed in "five years".

Rick was not a good programmer with a bad personality. He was a bad programmer with a bad personality.

More specifically it sounds like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, with certain telltale signs like gaslighting, the inability to accept fault, and dependency injection of the self into the lives of everyone else. The writer says, "I don’t believe Rick started out this way." I think he's wrong. Narcissistic Personality Disorder starts in childhood. So Rick was like this when he entered the business. In fact it is probably how he became "universally recognized on the team as the top talent" --- not because he was, but because he bullied his way up to that with his own self-aggrandizement, and his coworkers were too timid or inept to suggest that he was never actually a good programmer.

[the_biot]

I would caution against applying a label like "Narcissistic Personality Disorder". That is a clinical term, only applied after diagnosis by a qualified professional. You have not met "Rick", nor had a chance to examine him. I'm assuming you're not a qualified mental health professional either, or you'd know this.

[TheLoafOfBread]

I see it differently. Rick understood the product. He was not bothered about writing code properly, he wanted to get working product out of the doors.

I am writing that, because once I was maintaining code after similar Rick. In the code were lot of "dumb errors" which turned out to be undocumented edge cases and thanks to those "dumb errors" code performed much better than competitors code. So I would take with a massive grain of a salt an evaluation of a code by a person who took over the code of such Rick when this person also had antipathy towards said Rick.

[__derek__]

I had to assume "top talent" and "genius" were used ironically because neither applies to the Rick in this post. He has the megalomaniacal cowboy bit down, though.