[foo_barrio]

This played out at my last place. My boss would assign my co-worker to build the world's crappiest car in the least amount of time and when it broke down I would be the only one that seemed to be able to fix it (while my co-worker was busy building some other crappy car). I would have built a much better car in the first place! However I would have taken more time and the goal was to build and release as fast a possible. My boss was okay with the risk of said crappy car, my co-worker got promoted and I slowly burned out.

It's a tough balancing to make sure you sell yourself correctly and fight to work on things you want to!

[steveBK123]

We had a guy like this on our team once, it took a year to convince management he was a net drag on the team. Half the team quit, the other half said they would if they had to work with him any longer.

To prove the point we put him on a strategic rewrite and gave him master/trunk while the entire team moved to a feature branch for 6 months. This was complimentary to his ego as he was sick of us bureaucrats in the rest of the team telling him what to do and being such a burden on his genius creativity.

By the end he was unable to build / run his own branch, while the remaining team lost no velocity and was making regular releases to end users. The choice was easy at that point.