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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

While the concept of negative work is certainly instructive, my misgiving is that it's probably difficult or impossible to measure the overall value added (or subtracted) by any worker in a complex organization.

My guess is that most of us have our positive and negative moments, and hopefully the positives outweigh the negatives.

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Great point. While articles would have you believe that programmer skill is bimodally distributed (good vs. bad), it actually follows a normal curve like most other things. We all make some good decisions and some bad decisions everyday.

I'm sure we can all find a piece of code we wrote a year or two ago that makes us cringe a little bit.

I've known people who created negative work. Back when the economy was tanking in 2008 into 2009, we fired 3 developers at my job, the rest of us ended up getting more work done than we did when also having to deal with the work of those 3.

One of the 3 you could argue about, but the other two 100% caused extra work from having to clean up after them regularly. At least one of which was somehow a senior developer and the other was either dev or senior so neither had the excuse of being new/junior devs, and had been around for a few years by that point so they had time to learn.

This is pretty much how I feel about it as well. Sometimes you'll deal with a more complex system where bugs might creep in even for an experienced developer, that then end up needing bugfixes for a week to come.

Yet you might also write code that does it's job great (mostly) without bugs a week later.

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