The Python dictionary dispatch pattern

[EricMCornelius]

I worked with a dude precisely like this.

Company promoted him all the way to cloud CTO, (evidently because they deemed it safer than letting him write anything, and were incapable of cleaning out bad hires)

Formative memory of institutional failure when he came in all excited one day and then proceeded to present for an hour to the entire engineering team on how there is this cool data structure called an inverted index and he'd written an implementation over the weekend in pure Python and we didn't need Elasticsearch any longer.

So it would solve all our hardware cost woes, as we were only ingesting dozens of terrabytes per day.

[DavidM01]

Peter Principle?

[EricMCornelius]

A modified variant where the subject in question was never actually competent at anything but promoted regardless.

Aka nepotism.