The worst kind of programmer

I've been in both sides of these roles over the years. I think the problems in the article really seem to be lack of technical design or leadership though, rather than problems with individual programmers or personality types. You can't have one guy leave, another guy come in, have the same issues then blame the people. The process is broken!

At any kind of head count beyond 5+ people, you need to have some kind of framework in place for choosing and deploying technology. You need someone (it could be many someones, or even the whole team) who thinks about architecture at each step of a project, especially the first part. Conversely, your org should try to intercept "architecture astronauting" early and balance simplicity with decomposition and integration goals.

Managing people can be like herding cats. Managing programmers can be like herding autistic cats. But you still have to do it.

The org in the article sounds like it's missing CTO/engineering management.

Now their garbage keeps crashing with stack overflows, and they complain when files are bigger than a few hundred lines.

We accidentally pushed a 10,000 line file once and it brought the entire bus to a crawl for an hour. TEN THOUSAND LINES.

One day, these twerps pushing this stupidity of “copy everything always cause ‘it’s easier to reason about dawg’” are gonna get theirs.

The truly best are the ones that do very little indeed. We produce software, not objects. You get to save money when you use a good piece of software not when you write it. But they are seen as lazy.