I've seen both sides of this table. We had one Rick where i worked, above average coder, very bad ego. When one team had been working on a module for weeks, Ric

I've seen both sides of this table. We had one Rick where i worked, above average coder, very bad ego. When one team had been working on a module for weeks, Rick would review it, declare it as crap (loudly), throw all of it out and rewrite the whole thing in in a day and it would genuinely be better than the original. This was a huge waste of time for both the team and Rick. He would give himself veto to break backwards compatibility in public APIs and was against all forms of automated testing for this reason, this allowed him to produce a lot of code quickly on the expense of everyone else. Management considered him genius which made his ego even bigger, he worked over time often and produced the majority of all code, whenever something was not working he would blame modules not produced by him and management would believe it even though that was usually not the case. End result: working morale was shit and almost all other developers including myself left. I've also been close to becoming one myself, one of few with whole stack server setup on desk and all, being able to answer questions from team members in a few minutes which would take them hours or days to investigate they love coming to me for questions and during planning they say i'm the only one who can solve certain tasks. To avoid becoming a bottleneck and to give me time to work on my own tasks i just say i don't have time and let them solve their own problems, this makes the whole team more independent and happy and everybody is able to debug their own code. As others have already noted, management allowing it to go as far as it did in the article is the original source of the problem.