Major point of article:  Coders in large shops are often rewarded for writing lots of buggy code and then swooping in at the last minute to fix their own mess and make themselves the hero.

I worked with a guy; let's call him Squirrels, who was just this kind of coder.  He would churn out volumes of code.  Whereas some coders progressively improve their craft, this guy progressively randomized his output.  You could tell when he read a new article in MSDN because that code would go into his project.  Most programmers are somewhat guilty of this but this guy was the extreme.  He would try out something new and cool (or not so cool) while neglecting the basics of simplicity and readability let alone the niceties of error handling and maintainability. 

He would race ahead of his disasters, making junior programmers responsible for fixing his messes and then moving from Visual Basic to web development to database development and management seemingly just to avoid having to work on his own evil machinations.

I learned a valuable lesion, more != better and quality is sometimes hard to quantify especially for a little bald dude with a Napoleon complex and an ex-auto mechanic turned axe-man.  But that’s another post…