My experience is exactly the opposite. The TT ends up being the last engineer standing a lot of the time. The people who want to have better refactoring and more maintainable code are usually the ones who move on. The TT often stays in the same place for 25 years. Often correcting mistakes they themselves made in the past.

I knew one engineer who came in every Sunday night to process missed orders from an e-com system they wrote. They were unable to actually fix the problems with their code, so they just fixed the problems by hand. Every week...for years on end. Management thought he was a star who worked hard. The devs knew he was the worst engineer they have ever worked with. He still works at that same company 25 years later.

The correlation between what management thinks and reality can be pretty large at times.

> I have seen precisely zero consequences for these people because they usually leave after not too long and go somewhere else

In my case, it's worse than that. They usually get promotions, raises and move up the ladder. The business only cares about thing: making cash. This means pumping out feature as soon as possible because the sales team closed a million dollar contract, which includes features we don't have.

The engineers who deliver the features are noticed by managers and win big. No one cares about code quality and half the time, the code is rewritten or thrown away anyway..

I'm sure there exists organization where code is treated as art, but I sure as heck haven't worked in one. Over the years, I've given up trying to cleanup crap code, now I just get the work done as best as I can and call it a day.

I can tell you how that situation comes about.

You start by rejecting those PRs, saying "write more maintainable code, not quick hacks".

Management starts pressuring the original developer "why is it not merged yet, I thought you had it working".

That developer hits back with "well, it failed code review, they want me to refactor it".

Management goes back to the reviewer, "why did you fail this? It meets coding standards right? Pipeline is green".

Reviewer says "Well, yes it technically meets coding standards but it's full of hacks and is not future proof, it will bite us."

Management says "If we coded for tomorrow we'd never get anything done. Don't be so awkward". And then code gets merged.

Then you learn to just let these people go wild. If it hurts in the future you have a nice little "I told you so". But in my experience, management doesn't actually care if it hurts us in the future, it's not their problem. They just say "Well give me bigger estimates if you need to refactor". Fair enough, it's not a big deal but it is a pointless slog of picking up the pieces.

The other way it comes about is when the original developer just isn't really that good of a developer. So you end up in such an endless feedback loop trying to get the code in a good state that you piss everyone off and it's just easier to merge it.

Some hills just aren't worth dying on. And these guys can be exploited for your own advantage if you want to get code merged quickly ;)

Sometimes the issues emerge later. The code doesn't scale well, it has subtle bugs that crop-up later, it doesn't handle edge cases well. Basically, it answers the immediate issue well, but it is poorly engineered and hence, why it causes problems for others down the line.

> I have no idea how that situation arises unless the slower folks are just auto-approving PRs.

Restricting changes to PR's is nowhere near universal.

In objective terms, these tactical tornadoes are among the most valuable headcount at a big company to the extent that they can rapidly patch production issues and restore service, by any means possible.

The problem is allowing this kind of frantic tactical development even in "peace time".

They'll often exploit a power dynamic. If you're less senior than them, in some organizations it can be very difficult to stand up to that behavior. I experienced that at my previous employer as a relatively senior engineer, even. Top down organizations look unfavorably on feedback that runs upwards. Your pushback will be seen as standing in the way of progress.

> You kind of did that to yourself if you let the new person get away with it.

In theory, sure, but in practice, to echo the others, you often don't have a choice, because of power dynamics/politics.

Its easy to say "its management's fault", but the principle is the same - these guys are spammers and quacks (and deserve nothing less than to be confined to the level of hell reserved for spammers), they just have to spam long enough and something will get through (volume over quality). And after their "success" i.e. fraud, they can ditch the company and move onto the next. I've seen multiple "seniors" like this, not actually very good at the work, but great at pushing half-baked slop.

Yup, this was my first thought. Tell an LLM that there's a bug, and it will _happily_ add 200 lines to the project, usually wrapped in if statements so that it all interleaves with existing code. Then it will write twice as many lines in tests, run it all, and be done. Your bug is fixed. All the tests run, and test coverage went up. Now do that a couple dozen more times. :shudder:

But it really doesn't have to be like this.

For their bug bounty program, the company can just charge 5-10$ per submission to guarantee everything you send gets thoroughly reviewed by a human, and so it completely eliminates bot slop DDoS submissions overnight. If your bug and PR was actually good, then you get 10 + 1000$ back, and if it wasn't good, then you need to do better due diligence next time, and the skilled human feedback you received on why it wasn't good, was a valuable lesson for your engineering career, and it only cost you the price of a Starbucks latte, and it also cut out all the scammers polluting the system. This way everyone wins.

I said it before and I'll say it again, for opportunities open to the entire world on the internet, adding monetary friction is THE ONLY (anonymous) WAY to filter out serious people from bad actors doing spray-and-pray hoping they'll make some money, or get that job, by weaponizing AI bots. You can't rely on honor systems and a high trust society on the anonymous open internet, you need to financially gatekeep to save yourself and your sanity, and make sure the honest serious people you want to engage with don't end up drowning in the noise of the scammers and unscrupulous opportunists.

But we can't shut ourselves down just because we refuse to apply solutions to AI slop DDoS.

Do people like that exist?

Totally.

But seriously, I guarantee you the opposite is more common- the incompetent devs which can't manage shipping anything, keep trying to do "surgical and small edits" after 1 week of thinking about them and then have them blow up in prod for someone else to fix quickly because if it's up to them, it'll take 2-3 sprints

10 years ago I was a lot closer to what y'all talking about. After having more and more colleagues I can no longer agree and suspect this is mostly the opinion of incompetents which try to discredit regular devs.

Another thing they always lack is the ability to see when a large change is necessary because that's just what is necessary to achieve the feature in a stable manner. Sorry to say this, but starting of this discussion while trying to discredit large change sets in the age of ai is incredibly inept.

When you wrote your software well, large changes are possible and increase stability when you actually need to add a fundamental change of behavior. Which can come from a miniscule requirement.

But to close off on the topic of this article: they made the right call. In the open source context you cannot have this kind of incentive anymore with openclaw continuously shitting out one PR after another