Patterns emerge
I work with 3 people who are designated 'Technical Designers'. This is not an accurate description of their jobs, as they do little design work and mostly oversee other's work. One of them is the stray cat, but the other two are no winners either. The other two consist of individuals I will now think of as a plagiarist and a luddite.The plagiarist is just that, someone who claims someone else's work as their own. I have had him do it to me personally, I have seen him do it to a couple of other people, and yesterday I found out this is his pattern. I was having a discussion with him and the stray cat about some production code. The stray cat was upset because this code is something that the plagiarist had copied and had received a bonus for. Now, I knew this code was copied from another program in-house, but I didn't realize he had done it and didn't know he had received a bonus for it. So plagiarizing other peoples work is definitely this persons modus operandi.
The luddite's favorite saying is, "I don't want to do it that way because we haven't done it that way before." In the software development field this is a very unusual tack to take, but this is what she does repeatedly. If it is a new process or programming technique, she is opposed to it without having to hear anything other than 'new'.