[specialist]

Who would you tell?

I've had exactly one boss who understood (some) of what I do.

Managing others, I've been completely snowed by people who's work is outside of my areas of expertise (tech writing, translation, graphic design, etc).

[tunesmith]

We had a "hero" on one of my teams that was strong conceptually but made poor implementation choices. Hacks with poor design that invariably didn't integrate well. High energy, always jumped right in - when others wanted to slow down and consider stuff, it looked bad by comparison. Deadlines became more stressful with more last minute bugs (that he would special-case "fix" - hero!!), and it was impossible to complain about him because our manager wasn't deep into the code.

[buckbova]

Your story is in past tense, have you since quit this job or is the manager and hero gone?

You needed code reviews and design documents. If your group was too busy for this, then it needed this "hero" to keep pushing code out the door instead of dwelling on design choices.