Oh god, I've been there too. It's like watching code cancer develop and I'm helpless to stop it. Maybe if they can name an anti-pattern for this that can be r

Oh god, I've been there too. It's like watching code cancer develop and I'm helpless to stop it. Maybe if they can name an anti-pattern for this that can be readily referred to. I usually try to refer people to Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. But everyone presupposes they are smarter than me and old guys like him and smarter than the people who already wrote and tested and attained widespread adoptance (word?) of whatever library or framework already does this stuff he's re-writing. I've come to believe its an attempt to establish job security by writing vast tangles of custom code all their own. Trouble is when you have non technical managers who see him churning away - checking in loads of code and spending hours 'fixing' bugs (he introduced himself) so on paper he comes out looking way more 'productive' than others - so he becomes a darling.