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Makes me wonder if he wasn't a prolific tech debt producer who was seen by management to GTD.

No, but I know exactly what you mean. Years ago I was on a team where the "super star" was assigned all new work. The rest of us had to fix the bugs in their code.

At the finale, 5 people were doing nothing but fixing bugs in the "stars" previous projects. That's when senior management finally clued in to the problem and fired both the manager and the "super star".

going by the upvotes, we aren't the only people to have seen this anti-pattern...

Yeah, this is why I kind of like project ownership even though it's now considered out of fashion. If you create technical debt, you own it and it's your future productivity that takes the hit. Eventually your productivity grinds to a halt as you fix problems in the crap you wrote before.

I look at it as technically informed product ownership - merging business and technical domain knowledge to make the right tradeoffs. How else can you execute effectively?

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