The four worst words on a software project are:
    “Why can’t you just…”

-- Krazam, "Microservices", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

His catch phrase was "all you gotta do is [insert dumb idea here.]"

It was anxiety inducing for a while, then it turned into a big joke amongst the engineering staff, where we would compete to come up with the most ridiculous "all you gotta do is ..." idea.

"Can't we just..."

Last week, after 3 near-misses that would have brought down our service for hours if not days from a corner this engineer cut, I chaired a meeting to decide how we were going to improve this particular component. This engineer got invited, and spent thr entire allocated meeting time spreading FUD about all the options we gathered. Management decided on inaction.

I don’t mean people who “aren't rockstars” or people for whom some things take too long, or people who get things wrong occasionally (we all do).

I mean people who, like you describe, systemically undermine the rest of the team’s work.

I’ve been on teams where a single person managed to derail an entire team’s delivery for the better part of a year, despite the rest of the team screaming at management that this person was taking huge shortcuts, trying to undermine other people’s designs in bad faith, bypassing agreed-upon practices and rules and then lying about it, pushing stuff to production without understanding it, etc.

Management continued to deflect and defer until the team lead and another senior engineer ragequit over management’s inaction and we missed multiple deadlines at which point they started to realize we weren’t just making this up for fun.