At the time, our company had ~500 employees. The CTO would write code, and it would get merged almost immediately, he would brag about it in meetings. We would then quietly modify it to the point of it being unrecognizable.
Example: we talked about upgrading our scraper because it was getting blocked quite frequently. The CTO wrote a brand new one that was supposed to be much smarter than what we had in place. The only problem was, he wrote a python script. This was a php application. Yeah, it was merged, it never ran because, well it was python. We fixed some of the flaws in our scraper and reduced the block rate. The CTO saved the day...
Example: we talked about upgrading our scraper because it was getting blocked quite frequently. The CTO wrote a brand new one that was supposed to be much smarter than what we had in place. The only problem was, he wrote a python script. This was a php application. Yeah, it was merged, it never ran because, well it was python. We fixed some of the flaws in our scraper and reduced the block rate. The CTO saved the day...