On Friday I discovered another idiocy bomb from that guy, possibly the other staff eng in the org too.
I work in data infrastructure and one of the components of most orgs these days is Kafka. Now, Kafka is not the only one but it was one of the first as far as I know. These messaging services are used by various things to run applications, but they can also drive the org's decision making. At least how they are used today. Kafka is an immutable log of events created by an application to do something. Most of the time.
In the data space this means streaming all of the messages out of where they originate from Kafka and to some other location to be consumed by data processes that are not the application producing them. I get a number of "duplication" alerts from these. I start looking into them and the junior engineer on the team tells me that he just deletes them. These are not duplicates but logical duplicates. As in they existed across multiple partitions and offsets within Kafka but they do contain the same message body.
The junior engineers were told to delete them by manually going into the system and deleting them. This whole situation was caused by omitting the partition/offset metadata. So for years now whenever this happens they just deleted them. I spent some of Friday afternoon sitting down with the three junior engineers explaining basic Kafka functionality to them and how you can investigate this with tools like Offset Explorer if they are interested in better understanding. I also told them directly that if they are doing anything manually and regularly then that is wrong whatever it is. That if I had ever told my seniors 14 years ago that I had a solution requiring hours of manual workarounds to function when anything unoptimal happened they would have called me an idiot, asked why I didn't consider a list of issues, and that I should go try again.
I can understand these guys with less than 3 years in the industry didn't know any better and were just listening to their leadership. I am going to ask the staff engineer next week why he didn't recognize blatant retardation here and did nothing about it. He's a shitter too so I think I know my answer.