The Software Engineering Disaster
So I was previously working on this SAAS (software as a service) project. There was no proper UI design, no proper architecture thought out for it, and the timeline was thight so we build it quickly just to survive, as a result the code was fragile for instance if you changed something on the popup on the edit message page, your header's links magically stop working. On the homepage the buttons are rounded rectangles while the detail pages use a regular one, with a slight different shade of green for example due to the engineers eyeballing everything. Feature request by clients also took a long time to deliver, for example something that could be delivered within an hour took a day for instance. In short the developer experience was terrible and nobody wanted to work on the project, even the client is getting sick of it.
The Mad Genius
This was the time the Mad Genius showed up, originally a programmer but turned into a project manager/sales person due to the lack of such a much needed visionary. He returned to fix the issue. Honestly it was also much needed to save the sales as we were at the verge of losing the client at that point. So that night he created a huge commit, refactoring the problems in architecture and added a myriad of different screens and functions. Honestly many that I suspect nobody asked for, not even the client. When presented to the client they were reassured and overjoyed that many of the things they never knew they wanted were in, and hope for the future of the project was restored.
Honestly to me that was probably one of if not the most genius things he ever achieved. I mean refactoring the whole code base in a night? Adding features nobody asked for? I mean that's like taking on a bunch of responsibilities and liabilities that could caused you endless weekends of added shifts or monetary payback if it caused the client losses. Yet he trusted his confidence and masterful skills and it turned out to be the right call saving the day!!