Can I go to CTO and demand that he will demote a "senior engineer" (who takes senior's paycheck) who don't know what "race condition" is, and how to design/deal with it?

Why? Why I can't?

Can you imagine how many CTO's / people's court cases he would be dealing with if that was a thing?

And whatever the problem is, it's not because random employees can't demote other random employees.

Someone or something allowed for this to happen...and if they are still there, it will again.

@jotamontecino are you sane man? I'm talking about some basic stuff, while you counterargument with some edge case super advance stuff. Damn... that's weird

@jotamontecino that's my point. In my project a race condition is a must have to understand. Yet there's a senior, 18months in this project, and still not getting it.

@jotamontecino
Not only knowing about them, but also being constantly aware about race conditions is one of the essential senior skills (in backend development).
Having your code not corrupting data when it is used concurrently is one of the differences between a junior and a senior.
You know about concurency, locks, transactions, data sharing and message passing - or you aren't a senior.

@jotamontecino indeed. When I speak with him it's like he simply don't understand. Today same observation was confirmed by another folk.

Senior guy and I have to explain to him like to an intern (when interns begin better than him). It sucks all my energy. And it looks like management is blind, even when I said it clearly - and this made me rant today.

@bzq84

That's really weird.

I mean I wouldn't be opposed to having a very measured conversation with a manager about the situation. Provided you trust / have a good working relationship with that manager / you think you're not going to blow up office politics.

But if there's any chance of it blowing up I wouldn't even mention it.

It's weird, I'm a grubby web dev with a boot camp 'education' and I can understand a race condition ....

@N00bPancakes exactly, f**king office politics. Manager acknowledge that "he is not too good maybe" but didn't do anything since last 18 months to solve it. And now assigned me to his team to somehow "fix" things, and make him grow.

Impossible task, sucking all my life energy.

Ahh, and since on paper he is "senior", in books it looks like 2 seniors working on that project.

And I asked to assign another good engineer from another low important project. They said "no" due to office politics, and other blurry reasons.

@jotamontecino I'm looking already, as I lost hope that anything will change. If I go to upper management and point that this 3 or 4 guys (2 managers, 2 individuals) fucked up project since last several months, and that they don't understand basics needed to do job good, probably they will fire me anyway.

@jotamontecino
"And even inside server development,"[...]

When developing a server, every potentially concurrent request altering persistent data leads to a race condition if you don't explicitly protect against that.
But why would one do that if the concept of race conditions isn't known.

Servers dealing with mutable persistent data are quite common...