Hacker News Reader

"Technical debt from an H1b."

You seem to have jumped to a conclusion rather quickly. Even assuming for a second that the hysteria was because the new function that GP wrote is complex, wouldn't the reaction to that would've been "Can you write it more clearly?" instead of the hysteria and pariah ceremony?

That situation would warrant 10 min discussion with lead. Not this.

You version is quite paranoid on itself - junior denied learning and shunned for a single mistake.

In this scenario the lack of performance was significant, so I would say it was necessary. If performance was adequate, different story.

For example. We have a redux based content editor that is quite slow. It is however more than performant enough for the use case. I would love it if someone refactored it though...

You don't know how significant the performance difference was. You're just believing the commenter who thought it was without hearing from the company who obviously didn't think it was a priority.