3 ms·
At some point, the curve definitely bends negative. I used to work on a team adjacent to one of the most "productive" programmers at G by that metric. My team
by pclmulqdq 4y ago
At some point, the curve definitely bends negative. I used to work on a team adjacent to one of the most "productive" programmers at G by that metric.
My team, and at least 4 other surrounding teams, had one full-time SWE cleaning up after him. He would go around making changes assuming things that he thought were safe and breaking tests, then his manager would argue with you that because you didn't make a promise that what he did wasn't safe, you have to fix the test breakage.
- cdavid 4y agoYes, there are large negative externalities to a certain type of engineers who write a lot of code of dubious quality. Even after ignoring all the trivial cases of "artificial code stuffing", etc. I used to work in a very dysfunctional org where the main "architect" was writing lots of broken code that kinda works, and the 20+ people in the team around it would basically be full time in fire fighting mode. The architect was a very smart guy but ironically enough without any sense of architecture: his level of abstraction for network was pushing bytes through a pipe, and for loops for calculations.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThat was similar to this guy - he was a good IC who ended up being over-promoted to an "architecture" role (L7). He didn't really know how to architect things, so he went for creating externalities while resurrecting old, dead projects that past people had designed for him.