Productivity is not writing more code, but rather finishing more work, and while there's an overlap, they're substantially different things. If you are taking

Productivity is not writing more code, but rather finishing more work, and while there's an overlap, they're substantially different things. If you are taking less time than the rest, there are a couple of possibilities: - You are a legit virtuoso of software. <- this is possible, but less likely. - You are cutting corners and leaving work for others to do. <- this is much more likely In the first case there's no problem. In the second case you are not truly finishing your work and the team has a legitimate reason to ask you to finish your leftover work. If everyone starts contributing code leaving left-overs to inflate their productivity, it quickly becomes a race to the bottom: technical bankruptcy. If you are not able to explain what your code does word by word that means for a start that you did not read the documentation, you repurposed code you don't really understand. Therefore your time savings are at the expense of compromising the quality. If you didn't handle errors, if you didn't write tests, if you hardcoded magic numbers and strings, if you didn't test your code, if you didn't stick to the coding standard, if your identifiers don't reflect the code they represent, if you coupled unrelated code and performed actions at a distance... you are also saving time at the expense of the product quality because you cheated to finish earlier. All those problems add up to technical debt.