Every engineering team eventually faces this — a developer who outships everyone
combined, writes clean code, keeps production stable, but completely ignores the
pull request process.
So what do you do as an engineering manager?
Option A — Enforce the rules equally.
Your fastest engineer now waits 4 hours for a one-line review.
Six months later, they're gone.
Option B — Make an exception.
They keep shipping. But by month three, your best senior dev is
quietly asking why they're playing by different rules.
You don't have a 10x engineer anymore. You have a fairness problem.
There's no clean answer here. This short breaks down both sides of
one of the hardest calls in engineering leadership.
Have you been on either side of this? Drop it in the comments ?
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