Comment by oh_sigh
5 years ago
The Dead Sea effect is also what you get when people are rewarded for designing a system with unknown performance properties. They get promoted and move onto another project, meanwhile lower level people stay on board and discover all the quirks, oddities, bugs, flaws, shortcomings, etc of the "well designed system", and have to do solid work to keep it running.
Of course, that's all they are viewed as doing - keeping the system running - all the glory was reaped by the evaporated developer who moved onto other teams to make similar mistakes as before(since they weren't around to experience/fix them).
I have seen this a few times. In fact one place I've worked had it so bad that this was entire MO for a "director's pet" engineer. it would not even be a fully functional product but just a proof-of-conceptish hacked together design that demos basic feature with a bunch of shortcuts. this would be just credible enough to take credit of the design and move on. I have even seen him create a bunch of confluence pages with half baked info just so that the claim could be staked.
usually this is accompanied by technically clueless management.