VP of Eng here. If we take your statements at face value, your manager isn’t doing his job. Toxic employees are death to companies and it’s management’s job to get rid of them. (After attempting to address the issue. But my experience is that toxics are gonna toxic. Don’t coddle them.) If you’re willing to lightly scorch some bridges, talk to your skip-level manager. If that doesn’t work, or you don’t want to, your b…
Now how do I deal with an engineer who seems to be brilliant - though this is sometimes hard to gauge since code quality can be subjective - who always leaps in to answer things quicker and is loved by upper management because he, I guess, constantly codes even outside of work hours, but who is extremely grating to get along with. Lord I need a different job.
The issue is that, most of his "fixes" are just rearranging deck chairs, increasing timeouts, decreasing timeouts, adding memory, upgrading random libraries, etc., and he's constantly operating in "emergency mode", trampling on other people's work and priorities to get his "urgent" stuff out the door. He also just sort of throws things at the wall - "what if we change / disable X to fix this, would that break any client use cases?"... well, I dunno buddy, you are the one proposing the change, you have access to the logs, you are the genius, why is it _my_ job to evaluate your stream of half-baked ideas to separate the wheat from the chaff?
Ultimately, we co-exist, and I'd even say there are things to learn from him, i.e. being responsive is important and hugely valued. Over time, I've learnt not to get sucked into his urgent, half-baked proposals to save the world, I just say look, if you think that's a good idea, go for it, do it, but... you don't get to force it down everyone's throat and pretend there is consensus, I have my own, different priorities that I am not going to drop for you.