My team playfully makes fun of each other's code all the time. Every once in a while, someone does something stupid in code and we playfully make fun of that person, everyone on the team takes it in stride and our code is better for it.
Hell, every now and then I stumble across some idiocy in the code base and think "LOL, whoever did it this way is an idiot". git blame. "OH, hahaha, it was me, what an idiot past me was, amirite guys?" Everyone on the team takes levity about mistakes very seriously ;) It's healthy.
Mocking condescension on the other hand is a different thing entirely.
If someone's work is poor enough that a reasonable person might laugh at it, then there's nothing wrong with that. Hence the phrase "laugh at our mistakes". It doesn't mean you are a bad coder/painter, it just means you made mistakes that were a little funny and can learn from them like anyone else.
There's a difference between laughing at your own mistakes and laughing at someone else's. People who are ridiculed for making mistakes are incentivized to hide their mistakes rather than learning from them.
Is it? Or is it more like laughing at someone who built a table with 3 legs and wonder why it fell over? Or someone who fixed a car but forgot to put the engine back and wonders why they can't go anywhere?
That is completely unacceptable behavior. If you were in my company I would petition to have you fired. I hold a strict no asshole rule, life is too short to work with people who would do something like that.
Then you're as bad as he is. Especially given that he's already acknowledged he shouldn't have done it. Indignation doesn't make you right, it just makes you stubborn.
It sounds like your org is lacking in some basic leadership. If issues are brought up in the code it either needs to be corrected or justified with the team.
Granted, I don't think many engineers are making out with seven figures here, but they should be making whatever their shares were supposed to be worth at the most recent valuation. That's if they joined after the last funding round, more if they joined earlier.
If you don't want a catalytic converter on your car for performance or intentionally running rich a/f mix etc.. you can put the O2 sensor into a "spark plug tool" that'll trick the O2 sensor into thinking all is well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqDmmLQ4pGk
Hacks are not required to be sophisticated to be effective and people will find them. Maybe for example if you place a 1/4 inch of extra plastic in front of the front facing radar it'll make the car follow more aggressively then it's calibrated for, who knows! that's a made up example but I expect this stuff is going to happen as it already does.