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 wor

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. For me this reduces to a set of four challenge for a software startup: 1. Screen out folks with negative productivity in the interview process. 2. Avoid screening out potential employees who have great strengths in addition to some obvious weaknesses. 3. Attract, hire, and retain enough strong players from the start to complete your first product in a timely fashion. 4. Fire anyone who made an initially strong impression but who is actually negatively impacting the performance of the team (more broadly: identify and eliminate sources of negative productivity). This last category, the "plus minus" people, are only truly dangerous if you don’t have the ability to detect them and acknowledge that you have made a mistake.