Yes but I would have more fun coming up with it in 43ms in the first place. No need to artificially benchmark yourself against an old version of code. The market is the real benchmark - without the baggage of recode.
re crap programmers - I don't doubt that this kind of behavior exists, and certainly with the success of the games industry and the extremely low barriers to entry (unity/unreal/steam/app store etc), this behavior may even be commonplace.
If I was you I would have advised the senior dev to find another job. A company that operates like that is looking for code monkeys, not professional software engineers, and any such professional software engineers won't hang around for long.
re crap programmers - I don't doubt that this kind of behavior exists, and certainly with the success of the games industry and the extremely low barriers to entry (unity/unreal/steam/app store etc), this behavior may even be commonplace.
If I was you I would have advised the senior dev to find another job. A company that operates like that is looking for code monkeys, not professional software engineers, and any such professional software engineers won't hang around for long.