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I'm yet to see evidence that the types of people who whinge about these types of "brilliant programmers" are themselves much better at documentation, training a

I'm yet to see evidence that the types of people who whinge about these types of "brilliant programmers" are themselves much better at documentation, training and onboarding a team. The fact that devs like this are even in a position to whine and complain about their projects becoming unmaintainable after the star team mate leaves is a clear demonstration that they themselves have not made any substantial contribution to the maintainability or transferability of the codebase. Further, it shows they lacked the ability to professionally advocate for these things within the business. I'm very skeptical about these situational anecdotes where someone with low impact complains about someone with high impact. "I was on a team where the guy who wrote everything left and then everything sucked" is not a compelling vantage point.

sam_lowry_ 3y ago
OP here. I teamed up with a junior developer to deliver a sub-project of the main project cited above at 1/5 the expected cost. It did not need much documentation. For frontend, we took the Angular Homes tutorial and morphed it into the CRUD of a dozen business concepts. For backend, we used NamedParameterJdbcTemplate and skipped most of the MVC boilerplate. Other team members took ownership of that code and steered it into directions I wasn't even expecting. I was silent about the worst of us for most of my career, but now with retirement in sight, I really do not give a pluck what others think. I deliver, enjoy my work and call a spade a spade along the way. Yes, I am a low-impact developer, so let me quote the high-inpact Sir Tony Hoare to mark the point: Premature optimization is the root of all evil.