Netflix buffering issues: Boxing fans complain about Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson

I'm an engineering manager at a Fortune 500 company. The dumbest engineer on our team left for Netflix. He got a pay raise too.

Our engineers are fucking morons. And this guy was the dumbest of the bunch. If you think Netflix hires top tier talent, you don't know Netflix.

I hope to never have a manager who is mentally stack ranking me and my coworkers in terms of perceived dumbness instead of in terms of any positive trait.

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.

Isn't that a problem with your code review process? Why is that person's code making it to production?

So again, maybe they're a bad employee but it seems like nothing's done to even try and minimize the risks they present.