From driftglass:
David Brooks Cannot Stop Being David Brooks
I honestly think management was afraid of her. Her reaction was so unnerving and they were such a timorous bunch that I believe to this day they just decide it would be easier to do nothing — to give her smaller and smaller projects and let her do her thing until she retired and have people like me clean up her messes — than to risk whatever they were afraid she would do if they tried to rein her in or lay her off.
Plus, on the balance sheet, Debbie looked good. After all, because she just dumped her shitty code into Production in whatever error-riddled state it was in when the project budget ran to zero, she never went over budget. Which was the only metric the Counters of Beans used to measure success. My team, on the other hand, was constantly going over-budget running up the overtime fixing her fuck-ups. This made the Counters of Beans very upset because Going Over Budget was the only metric they had for measuring failure.
When we tried to explain why we were running up so much overtime, we might as well have been speaking Aramaic. To hamsters.
Plus corporate management had much bigger problems on their hands. This was a family business which was now in the hands of the third generation, and that third generation was spectacularly bad at managing the company. They had brought the place to the brink of ruin, so the problems of a bunch of programmers twelve tiers down the corporate food chain arguing about Who Struck John never rose to their attention.
Which brings us now to the subject of Mr. Brooks and the question of what error-riddled twaddle he dumped onto op-ed page of The New York Times — on time and on budget — today.