Basically they just picked and choose whatever they felt like working on (in both cases they were raised on a pedestal by the company owners so got away with this). They were not team players and other developers needed to pick up the slack on the less interesting grunt work that needed to be done to keep things working.
All of the code did something but none of the code said anything. It was horrible.
I very quickly embraced the notion that software wants a mix of developers of different skill levels, so that any task that must be done can find an author who will remain engaged, and not have to create baroque code to get themselves to do the work.
My team had a discussion about this and some argued that this might alienate programmers who are novices, and might be easier to use "Enlgish" but I think that if the problem space for your software is niche enough then a new team member, or a novice will have to learn terminology either way. In my opinion, programming terminologies are more precise and transferable to other programming jobs and problems in general, so is a more sustainable and relevant way of learning. It might be tough at first, and I agree the attitude of the senior dev would make a huge difference, but as long as the senior dev takes the initial confusion of the novice as a good teaching moment, and explains it patiently and clearly I think it can be more valuable in the long term.
The Pattern Language approach to code didn't have to turn into naming everything after patterns (and then arguing endlessly about the ones that are ambiguously differentiated). It could have just been a field guide to spotting them. I recall reading a few good papers about how 75% of that book is just idiomatic functional programming code. I am blissfully unaware of anyone in the FP space getting suckered into actually naming anything after the official names.
I attended a workshop a couple years back, run by a person who was 1 degree of separation away from the Gang Of Four and he asserted that book was a Masters or PhD thesis for the youngest author and the other people were essentially editors. This was all news to me. I suspect if I had known this I would have pushed back a lot sooner, instead of getting sucked in too. A decade of OOAD ruined by someone's college project...
GoF tells you What. ‘Refactoring’ tells you Why, and gives some pointers on How. In any field, if you know the why and the how of something, and the what doesn’t work itself out? Then you’re in the wrong field.
(He’s gotten promoted twice since we parted ways. He’ll be just fine.)
e.g. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/GOF/hires/chap1fso.htm "An object-oriented program's run-time structure often bears little resemblance to its code structure. The code structure is frozen at compile-time; it consists of classes in fixed inheritance relationships. A program's run-time structure consists of rapidly changing networks of communicating objects. In fact, the two structures are largely independent. Trying to understand one from the other is like trying to understand the dynamism of living ecosystems from the static taxonomy of plants and animals, and vice versa."
I haven't read enough about DDD to know if he was just a precursor or onto something else, but it does seem to map well to my least comfortable work situations.
It annoys me when I have to do some hackerrank crap as an interview, as it's nothing like how I work - having a hard time limit to come up with some algorithm. Or some question about what Python will do if you write it in an obscure and horrible way. I write far better code than I did fresh out of universty, but I am a lot slower at that sort of stuff as I make a point of avoiding it in my work.
Instead of solving the problem, a corner of my brain is thinking "all I want to know right now is: is there a greater than 0 chance that this sort of code appears in a PR and if so, we are done."