It was sabotage in the 'oops this project isn't working' or 'oops this really import thing came up, no time' or 'didn't I do that?' sense. Having some plausible deniability. Work slowdown/stoppage stuff. Not actively breaking things (mostly). And it was all directed at maintaining control/power.

Worst person I've ever worked with. When I tell stories at future jobs I fully expect people to not believe me. Hell, people who weren't there for earlier incidents often didn't believer them.

Oh I believe you. I've heard of it before. Was trying to say that if that's an issue, it should be an HR fix more than an infrastructure fix. But I also imagine often that person also convinced management the are an "11x rockstar programmer"...

They were one of the hardest working people in the company. Partially that's because they worked on nonsense projects they made up, and partially that's because they were always putting out fires caused by the fact they did things poorly in the first place.

That's scares me cause I've seen that bit way too many times. There are huddled over the terminal in the evening as all managers leave "Oh look so and so is working so hard" and I am thinking "they are fixing the bug they put in just last week because they didn't bother testing it enough".

Tons of that. Each server was a literal copy of a previous one then modified to fit its new role. So we never got two servers that were the same. They'd have extra junk on them too.

Just basic docker use (or something similar) would have made a HUGE difference. Parts of the department were sent to training but it didn't happen because it would have made him less indispensable.

At one point someone higher up (but not high enough) asked how many servers we had in Amazon and the answer like 10x our physical set.

"And only one of you manages them?"

"On the side, we don't usually have to touch them."

"Then why does it take 4 people for the other servers?"

(Collectively) "Yeah. Why IS that?"

Change control was a big problem too. "Random" changes, things that didn't change at all (even when we could prove it), stuff like that causes SO MANY issues, basically all avoidable.