I'm not a manager and I don't stack rank people, but I am 100% capable of knowing when one of my co-workers or predecessors is a fucking moron.
The trick is to use my massive brain to root cause several significant outages, discover that most of them originate in code written by the same employee, and notice that said employee liked to write things like
// @ts-nocheck
// obligatory disabling of typescript: static typing is hard, so why bother with it?
async function upsertWidget() {
try {
// await api.doSomeOtherThings({ ... })
// 20 line block of commented-out useless code
// pretend this went on much longer
let result = await api.createWidget({ a, b, c })
if (!result.ok) {
result = await api.createWidget({ a, b }) // retries for days! except with different args, how fun
if (!result.ok) {
result = await api.updateWidget({ a, b, c }) // oh wait, this time we're updating
}
}
// notice that api.updateWidget() can fail silently
// also, the three function calls can each return different data, I sure am glad we disabled typescript
return result
} catch (error) {
return error // I sure do love this pattern of returning errors and then not checking whether the result was an error or the intended object
}
}
function doSomething() {
const widget = await upsertWidget()
}
...except even worse, because instead of createWidget the name was something far less descriptive, the nesting was deeper and involved loops, there were random assignments that made no goddamn sense, and the API calls just went to an unnecessary microservice that was
only called from here and which literally just passed the data through to a third party with minor changes. Those minor changes resulted in an internal API that was actually worse than the unmodified third party API.
I am so tired of these people. I am not a 10x rockstar engineer and not without flaws, but they are just so awful and draining, and they never seem to get caught in time to stop them ruining perfectly fine companies. Every try>catch>return is like an icy cat hand from the grave reaching up to knock my coffee off my desk.