>Which did not help customer satisfaction for my parts... So I decided to go theatrical (not really my typical mode of operation...) and chew him out before large segment of devs. His defense of the code he changed in high class did help: "That code works! You can copy it!"...

Ouch. Not dead enough in those cases, and I remember one... where I was (working for a) contractor/contributor on a larger project, and one in-house coder tried to, ahem, fix one of the central pieces of code in the framework. It was central because it was so generalized it could work in several contexts, depending on various parameters, and produce its output in several shapes, orders, selections of records etc. He fixed something cosmetic in one of the cases and fucked up most of the rest. However, the guy was the manager's protege...

I managed not just to fix the code - we had source control even then, in 2002, and it would have been easy to revert - but also to keep the changes others made after his fix, and even to improve the stability of the whole thing. Which probably got me the excellent letters of recommendation for the next job... from other guys on the project, not the manager. Somehow he must have felt I humiliated his pet.