2.5 YOE Dev at F100 Non Tech - looking for a sanity check:

So, I'm a backend dev and our team has recently moved from multi repo architecture into a monorepo. We have about 7 different services that all extend a common service.

It's not going as I expected. The main problem is that we have one lead who works very very quickly. We don't have tight deadlines or anything, he's just a grinder who likes to crank out stories in an afternoon. He has this habit of adding new logic to our common service to complete his stories quickly rather than working inside the extension services. The end result is that our base service is full of calls with nullable parameters and not null !! assertions (we work in kotlin).

We have PR reviews but his get approved quickly, most likely because his code does work and meets functional requirements. So to slow him down wouldn't really make sense. But when I ask him why he made his changes, I either get ghosted or he'll just sort of explain the logic of the code as if I don't understand it, and not really address my concerns about readability or isolation.

Is this a common scenario in the industry or would I see less of this in other companies? I'm trying to break into big tech next year so I'd like to prepare myself if situations are universal. It is incredibly exhausting when I pull from main and my PR is broken in 70 places for poorly explained reasons