There is another kind of pernicious developer: the one who writes large amounts of seemingly effective, but ultimately bloated code. What we often fail to real

There is another kind of pernicious developer: the one who writes large amounts of seemingly effective, but ultimately bloated code. What we often fail to realize is that 'code = cost'. Once written, code has to be maintained, and every line adds to the inherent complexity of the system. I think we are all familiar with that old IBM (OS/2?) allegory of the dev who mostly spent time removing code from the system, and had to justify his salary because they were measuring 'lines produced' as a metric. If you can 'remove a line of code' from software and it still 'does the same thing' ... well, that's definitely worth more than adding code :). Anyhow, it's worth considering that 'number of lines of code' is really quite a bad measure of anything. Second - some people are really bright, but they struggle with clarity etc.. Perhaps it would be appropriate to put someone like this on a bug clearing team? They can 'solve problems' by tracking down issues, and hopefully fix them. 'Fixing' code is often much safer than writing new code as the patterns, standards, practices are already 'in place'. It's a rather a paradoxical and intriguing business, writing code!