Story about a jerk developer (who still got special treatment)

There are myriads of stories of people recounting their experiences with unusual coworkers, sometimes extremely unpleasant ones. Here's mine.

I work for a tech company that, besides doing its own research&development, provides consulting services for other companies (which is actually pretty common here, among most tech companies). "Providing consulting services" is just a fancier way of saying, essentially, "renting expert developers". (This is a service that's quite on demand. If a company can't find anybody with enough expertise to outright hire, they will seek such a developer from another company, even if it's more expensive. The advantage is that the "consultant" is almost guaranteed to be competent and an expert on the subject matter, and it's much simpler and easier for the company to temporarily "rent" him than to actually hire someone, which comes with a whole swamp of legal obligations here.)

I was one time "rented" to another tech company to help develop their software, and at some point the same team "rented" another consultant from a different company to work on the same project.

This guy was an astonishing jerk.

Several times during eg. team daily and weekly meetings he would lash out about his work conditions, and say things like "it's all the same to me, if my services aren't needed I'll just go back to my company", in a very unpleasant tone, and as if he felt underappreciated for granting this company the grace and privilege of his services and work.

While it interrupted such meetings and immediately soured the mood of the entire thing, rather incredibly even the team manager, or anybody else, never told him anything. They just kept silent and submitted to the verbal abuse. Which is what astonished me the most.

One day I was reviewing a merge request he had made for the project, and I was quite unhappy about how hard his code was to read and understand. I wrote in the review ticket a suggestion to use better, clearer, more understandable and more informative function and variable names, and gave an explanation and argument to why that would be a benefit and a good idea for code readability, and why the completely cryptic names he was using (which were also against the variable naming policies of the company) were hindering understanding his code.

He responded with "you are wrong" and closed the issue. That's it. "You are wrong." Nothing else. Then he went ahead and just merged the branch in question.

And mind you, he was not allowed to close the issue on his own, nor go ahead and do the merge on his own, without proper approval, as both things were against company policy.

This company, besides very tightly following the Scrum development model, had a bunch of other policies, and among them was that no review or issue ticket can be closed by the developer himself. Instead, the developer has to either fix the problem or give an explanation to why it's actually not a problem, and the person who wrote the ticket has to agree and close the ticket himself. (Only under very special circumstances was it allowed for someone else to close the ticket, eg. if the original issuer was not available anymore or some other similar reasons.)

So not only did he not present any explanation to why he wasn't going to make the changes, he went and just closed the ticket on his own even though that was against the policy.

Moreover, merging a branch without the approval of the reviewers was also forbidden by company policy. Only after all the reviewers have marked the merge request as approved, could it be done. He went ahead and did it anyway, completely ignoring the rule.

I complained to the team leader about this. Do you know what he did? Absolutely nothing. That's what.

I told him directly "I'm not going to review any of his code ever again, if that's his attitude."

And why was he allowed to act in a completely unprofessional manner in team meetings, act like a complete jerk and jackass full of himself, and allowed to bypass strict company policy and bypass code reviewers and do merges into the main branch on his own?

Nobody ever told me why, but I got the impression is that he was tolerated because he appeared to be able to write so much code so quickly. He got special treatment and special exemptions, and his unprofessional behavior was tolerated and ignored, because he could get things done quickly.

And mind you, his programming skill weren't exactly stellar. His code was mediocre, and his understanding of the language was mediocre. That didn't matter, apparently. 

This became quite a lot clearer some months later when the company management announced to the team that they would need to get rid of some of the consultants because the company was cutting expenditures due to financial troubles.

Can you guess who the team ended up ending the contract with, and who they ended up keeping? You guessed it: I was let go, and he was kept. I'm guessing because he wrote so much code so quickly. Professionalism and quality of code be damned.