Very large portions of some very major companies have <4 years work experience. Couple that with incredibly large engineer to management ratios and that inexperienced devs are often placed under more experienced ones, and the ability to call out unmaintainable code starts to diminish.
A lot of these prolific devs will not see the code base complexity for the "tragedy of the commons" it is, and bemoan the people and teams who start to try adding "regulations" (meetings/code review) to protect the common because it slows down their ability to meet their management given goals.
There is also a magic phrase that frequently disarms attempts to prevent bad code from entering a code base "this is just temporary." It's easy to put off fixing the "temporary" code forever as other things become higher priority.
Often times someone will inherit a staff engineer's code and therefore won't have been able to stop it. Sometimes staff engineers are able to create an entire service with minimal review that is then "gifted" to a team to refine and maintain.
In a lot of these situations, the feedback mechanisms (yearly peer review) will limit who can give feedback about who, not to mention they are not anonymous and staff engineers are usually highly connected.
A lot of these prolific devs will not see the code base complexity for the "tragedy of the commons" it is, and bemoan the people and teams who start to try adding "regulations" (meetings/code review) to protect the common because it slows down their ability to meet their management given goals.
There is also a magic phrase that frequently disarms attempts to prevent bad code from entering a code base "this is just temporary." It's easy to put off fixing the "temporary" code forever as other things become higher priority.
Often times someone will inherit a staff engineer's code and therefore won't have been able to stop it. Sometimes staff engineers are able to create an entire service with minimal review that is then "gifted" to a team to refine and maintain.
In a lot of these situations, the feedback mechanisms (yearly peer review) will limit who can give feedback about who, not to mention they are not anonymous and staff engineers are usually highly connected.