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Comment by ravedave5 | Hacker News Reader

I'll never forget having a negatively productive programmer on my team. If he spent an hour on a PR it would take 1.5+ hours of work to get the PR into shape to merge by other people because it took so much explaining for this guy. It was usually better to just scrap his code and start over. If code of his did slip through reviews often times there would be production defects that would then take more time to solve (tracking down the issue, figuring out where the code was, overhead of service tickets etc) than the original implementation. Just totally wild, he had somehow survived years in the org being shipped from team to team and being a nice pleasant guy to be around. How does one calculate the productiveness of someone on a team compared to that?

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Being outwardly pleasant can take precedence over just about anything. I find it ironic as this can lead to a lot of other unpleasantness, perhaps even resentment, people leaving, etc.

Being technically competent while also being perceived as merely neutral personality wise can lead to a lower overall qualitative evaluation, potentially affecting raises, promotions, etc.

I guess the lesson is that you (almost) always have to play the game or at least that playing the game well can yield many personal benefits.

Just be thankful there is a process to get the PR's into shape.

My worst experience is someone who was highly prolific at creating enormous amounts of tech debt without the process in place to block it. We are still only about 50% through working off this giant stack of tech debt 2 years later.

I heard of a creature like that. I think they are called human being. Someone who was assigned to a team of highly efficient robots that never make mistakes and produces bug-free code. Production defects? Yeah, it's obviously that guy's fault alone. /s

If I didn't know any better, it sounds like you are just using the guy as someone to conveniently blame.

I disagree with that, it really isn't "normal" to have someone like that, but it does definitely happen. Doing a crap PR once in a while is absolutely normal for everyone, but doing that regularly isn't.

This is clearly someone who is working beyond their abilities, and needs help and mentoring.

This is not the person's fault, though, this is a management issue, and maybe also a cultural one, where people just assume this person "should know" just because they've been at the company for a long time, and mentoring would be "beneath" them.

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