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>I never said he was fired. This code was a nightmare to maintain because he wished to show others how much smarter he was than everyone else. A 40 function else condition is beyond the pale. Too bad we didn't have code-reviews back then, that would never have gotten traction. It was pure gibberish and gave no indication as to what was failing.
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>That code was written 2 years before he was let go, so he had multiple warnings and chances.

It seem that problem in this case was not strictly quality of code he did, but maybe some other things.

As for code; From what I can see guy invented naming convention that gave him pretty good overlook/access to the code while in property/method edit mode.
As if guy for some reason did not like/use Class Browser, or maybe invented/got used to doing it this way long before things like class browser / document view came along. As for If _this _that _other... again matter of (possibly bad) taste but workable again as he splits lines downwards
by using semicolons

If _this ;
_that ;
_other ;

No damage, unless guy got arrested by angry squad of code fashion police! {g}
(aka http://uk.eonline.com/shows/fashion_police :)) (Were you maybe Joan Rivers of that squad ? {g})

If this code is for some high important purpose fine (like foundation code) then fine. It could have been tad more elegant (I would go for Marcia's way perhaps), but if it is for some ordinary data migration as it seems, then what a heck ? It is as good as any, provided it does the job.

Now since you exposed someone else's work on a public display here, why don't you put some of your own stuff here (and perhaps some code of those who did not get fired) so we can all have peak at it. (Fashion code police is hiring !!! ) Perhaps it would bring answer was the guy really fired for being worse programmer there, or it was something else going on.

If development team and foundation code is extremely good and coding standards extremely high (which is rarity), then quality of coding can be the issue, but my (uneducated) guess is that guy simply did not fit with the rest of the crowd there.

That can be indeed big problem.