[lawn]

Unfortunately it's not that unbelievable...

At work a newly hired (and newly graduated) developer got the responsibility to completely redesign some core functionality in our application. Of course he had no experience with the system or how it was being used, but he was still rewriting it and designing future use-cases.

This was also done with as far as I can tell no code reviews, tests or supervision, only vague directions of "this sounds good, do it!".

It's been years since he left for greener pastures, and we're still reeling from the consequences.

[schnebbau]

This happened to me. Uber-qualified graduate came in as a decision maker, fucked a load of stuff up, then left. Then the tenured devs gradually started leaving in revolt. Then the product died.

[Cthulhu_]

Sounds familiar. I worked at a bank once that had the brilliant idea of swapping out Angular with Polymer, because an early 30s guy with Google in his CV became the new CTO and Decided that it should be Polymer / web components.

They were just about finished with making their Polymer 1.x components ready for Polymer 2 when the Polymer project once again did an overhaul and split off to lit-html or whatever.

I mean they picked an experimental / in development project that was best known for running McDonalds menu displays. We had to fix basics like memory leaks because it didn't have proper routing - it wasn't a web application framework, but they tried to use it as such.

[zeroego]

Oof, my condolences. As someone who was a junior somewhat recently I narrowly avoided a couple of projects like that. The desire to push off important work to cheap labor blows my mind.

[michaelrpeskin]

Ha! I’m a staff engineer now, but many many years ago when I was a junior I got the same type of project. It was the CTOs pet project to reimagine the core processing framework. I still feel bad for the folks maintaining it now. I was an expert in the kind of thing that the CTO wanted so it was a good project for me, but I should have had a senior to guide the process and tests and things like that.

[whamlastxmas]

I briefly worked at a web dev shop that was stuck building a project that a mid level PHP developer started in 2014 using a framework he built himself. I thank god often I wasn’t the one tasked with learning this spaghetti framework with no documentation