> The result is net-negative productivity. There's a classic paper out there... The Net Negative Producing Programmer by G. Gordon Schulmey > We've known sin

> The result is net-negative productivity. There's a classic paper out there... The Net Negative Producing Programmer by G. Gordon Schulmey > We've known since the early sixties, but have never come to grips with the implications that there are net negative producing programmers (NNPPs) on almost all projects, who insert enough spoilage to exceed the value of their production. So, it is important to make the bold statement: Taking a poor performer off the team can often be more productive than adding a good one. [6, p. 208] Although important, it is difficult to deal with the NNPP. Most development managers do not handle negative aspects of their programming staff well. This paper discusses how to recognize NNPPs, and remedial actions necessary for project success. (The early 60s may be a reference to (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=421858 ) > Gordon Bell, architect of the DEC VAX wrote "High Tech Ventures" and included this section on NNP's Negative Productivity is a principle that I claim is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Normal principles of productivity assume that workers create positive output. Brooks refined the concept of software productivity to express it in terms of the "mythical man month," and in software engineering, it is understood that different programmers vary in their productivity by several orders of magnitude. According to the principal of negative productivity, it is possible for an individual to produce bad results that others must then redo; hence, someone who is very negatively productive can keep a whole team busy with damage control, preventing the team from producing any output whatsoever. Various locations of the paper - https://web.archive.org/web/20160305234708/http://pyxisinc.com/NNPP_Article.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160305234708/http://pyxisinc.c... https://www.scribd.com/document/557220119/NNPP-Article https://www.scribd.com/document/557220119/NNPP-Article And here it is discussed at C2 - https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer https://wiki.c2.com/?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer