Derek wasn't paid spectacularly well (though above the national average), and also slapped a bunch of copyrighted code into the codebase, then uploaded medical

Derek wasn't paid spectacularly well (though above the national average), and also slapped a bunch of copyrighted code into the codebase, then uploaded medical data to GitHub. All of which could have instantly ended his career if the other engineer had the time to review his work sooner. I think there are some (many?) people that willfully obfuscate - I have been this person when dealing with narcissists or saving management from themselves - but I just don't see a version of this where he was a very savvy operator. To quote Patrick McKenzie, the correct calibration is that some amount of evil exists in the world, but the whole world isn't evil. I.e, this is Incompetent Derek, and at some other company is Evil Derek.