If he had the respect of his coworkers, I'm guessing "Rick" was really a 10x programmer, BADLY MANAGED.
You need somebody else who understand the project objectives and can put a limit to the development of "configurable" options.
>Rick’s product supported a dynamic workflow with over fifteen thousand permutations. In reality 99% of our use cases followed one of three paths. The team hard-coded the workflow. This removed over 30% of Rick’s work
That's a failure of the manager, not the programmer.
The good programmers, the ones who enjoy their work, will choose a complicated but beautiful path, will choose to make a configurable workflow whose configuration is itself configurable in LISP. It's the manager job to know that the workflow can be hard-coded and then avoid complexity by the love of complexity (good programmers love complexity solved by intricate and beautiful code). If not managed correctly, 10x programmers will choose the most complex, self-configurable solution where a hard-coded workflow will do.
TL;DR: It seems a manager failure. Top talent needs top management in order to focus great creativity in the narrow path of productivity clients will pay for.
>Rick’s product supported a dynamic workflow with over fifteen thousand permutations. In reality 99% of our use cases followed one of three paths. The team hard-coded the workflow. This removed over 30% of Rick’s work
That's a failure of the manager, not the programmer. The good programmers, the ones who enjoy their work, will choose a complicated but beautiful path, will choose to make a configurable workflow whose configuration is itself configurable in LISP. It's the manager job to know that the workflow can be hard-coded and then avoid complexity by the love of complexity (good programmers love complexity solved by intricate and beautiful code). If not managed correctly, 10x programmers will choose the most complex, self-configurable solution where a hard-coded workflow will do.
TL;DR: It seems a manager failure. Top talent needs top management in order to focus great creativity in the narrow path of productivity clients will pay for.