I unlocked a new achievement. I got coworker to quit. I am 3 months into this job and one of my peers has been here for 4 years. All of his work has glaring stupid design flaws and manual workarounds.
When I was in my first few weeks there I had some task that involved loading one of the many dev environments with data for a different team. He shows me how he does this and it involves, and I shit you not, loading up a local env of the application, editing like 50 lines by hand, changing environment variables in a different code repo, and manually executing this. You had to do this several times. He proceeds to tell me that this is a pain in the butt. I was floored by this retardation. Even in my first year working as a java developer this would have been completely unacceptable as a "solution." My seniors back then would have slapped by hand and called me an idiot for even proposing something so retarded.
I told him that this is stupid and the design is not ideal. I propose ways to make this very simple and automated with minimal complication. He just kind of went "oh IDK about that." I just went and updated it in an afternoon and went about my day. As time went on I find that all of his work has dumb shit like this and he has somehow been employed for over a decade. This week we had a failure somewhere and the error from it was all "failed to upload 200 files." He tells me that this happens periodically and to fix it he manually downloads hundreds of files one by one in Azure blob storage and then again manually uploads them to an internal metadata tool that is like a SFTP.
He was proud of having done this Herculean effort (his words). I just had it with him as he was telling this in the team meeting about how hard work it was and how long he spent doing this. Legitimately patting his own back. I told him right there that nothing about that is good. Every aspect of this design is far less than ideal and it wouldn't even take that long to refactor this out of the feature and this is completely unacceptable. I refactored it right after that team meeting in 20 minutes. Showed it to the team the next day and explained that this kind of basic robustness is the expectation, I have no idea where it became the norm here to do things that shouldn't even be done in a university class.
Dude quit this week. No two week notice or anything so I have my suspicions. My manager is also new and I asked him what the deal with this is. From what he's gathered the entire org just lacks a lot of maturity and these acts of "Hero Engineering" are understood by leadership to be amazing so they tolerate it. He agrees with me that we need to raise the bar and I am just shitting on all of this when I find it. I like all of the architecture challenges here but this is really silly. But the company did not exist 8 years ago and is ten times larger today than it was 4 years ago.
Coworker in question here is, of course, a streetshitter.