Comment by dvtrn

One thing I've noticed is the better an engineer gets, the better they are at shooting down every idea they see.

This was two jobs ago. Razor sharp developer, could come up with any feature you asked him to. Which was the problem, if ideas didn't originate from him, good freaking luck getting him to work on it. He cost us to miss a few critical deadlines because of his refusal to let other people do their jobs unless it satisfied his demands, company refused to fire him because he had been around so long and carried institutional knowledge about the application but also refused to de-silo himself-thereby making the entire engineering effort dependent on his knowledge.

Guy went from a severely annoying veteran on the team to being given management duties over the team once our old boss retired due to health concerns (irrelevant to the job itself-he just drew a very unlucky health card). I and several other developers were out the door soon after because none of us wanted to report to him.

Company later got acquired. I like to peep in on their "About Us" company roster page every now and then. He's still there. But I've seen 3 different people in three years in my former role reporting to him show up on the roster, and then disappear and then get replaced by a new face.

"People don't quit jobs, they quit bosses".