Last year at my previous company, I found myself in the most uncomfortable position of my career: sitting across from my manager, being asked to name the person responsible for a production bug that had cost us two days of downtime and thousands in lost revenue.
The answer was simple. The code was written by our principle engineer , someone who commanded respect from half the team and fear from the other half. Someone who hadn’t touched an IDE meaningfully in months but somehow remained untouchable in the office hierarchy.
I gave the honest answer. That decision changed everything.
The Phantom Senior
Let me paint you a picture of “Alex” (name changed, obviously) from my last company. Eight years at the organization, principal engineer title, corner desk, and a voice that dominated every technical meeting. Alex spoke in grand engineering visions, threw around buzzwords like “microservices orchestration” and “event-driven paradigms,” and had an uncanny ability to make everyone in the room nod along.
There was just one problem: Alex’s last meaningful code contribution was six months ago. And it was broken.