My colleague has 22 years of engineering experience across a wide range of problem spaces and industries and team sizes (large bigco to mom/pop orgs).
Another guy (X) started was a year out of high school.
X insists that 'tech XYZ' is the best. Current tech stack was partially rebuilt by my colleague, but wasn't finished (because... lots of reasons, mostly resourcing).
XYZ is not only not a great fit, but the ecosystem supporting the problem space is small, especially considering what's already in place. Terabytes and years of data need to be migrated (both physically to new data centers and code-wise - new structure handling has to be added to accommodate current and future needs).
In planning meetings, "all voices need to be heard"... so X pushes XYZ a lot. And randomly rebuilds small bits in XYZ. And when it doesn't work - blames everything else (it's the network, it's the supporting libraries, it's ...).
The CTO will not push back. "That sounds great! That sounds like it'll solve all our issues!". There's a criminal deficiency in the understanding of the current tech stack or problems, along with no experience in migrating anything. But any criticism is taken as "we need to be more inclusive and let more people speak up - some of the best ideas can come from people who've not traditionally been heard".
Up to a point, that can make sense. But when do you draw the line? 3 months? 6 months? 18 months? People insisting on promoting child-like understandings of problems and solutions - while not ever delivering anything resembling a working solution - at some point should not be listened to.
Why does my colleague stay? He's only part time right now, and was close to leaving, but there's been some shift to refocus the CTO on something else, which may - over the next month or so - leave the few competent people there alone enough to get things back on track. I think if this was a 'full time' gig for him, he'd have left already.
