Comment by DesiLurker

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.