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@ asyncmind
2025-01-29 00:39:27Negative productivity is when a person or team’s work output not only fails to contribute positively but actually causes more harm than good. In software development, this means writing code, making decisions, or introducing processes that increase complexity, create more bugs, generate technical debt, or slow down others, resulting in a net loss of productivity rather than a gain.
Why Consultants Never Mention Negative Productivity:
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They Are Paid to Sell Optimism
Consultants are brought in to "fix" things, so acknowledging negative productivity undermines their value proposition. Their success is tied to appearing as a solution, not revealing that certain efforts could make things worse. -
Metrics Obsession Ignores It
Many consultant-driven productivity metrics (e.g., velocity, lines of code, hours billed) don’t account for whether the work was actually valuable. They measure output, not impact. -
Short-Term Focus
Consultants are often temporary fixtures in an organization. Negative productivity often manifests over time, after they’ve left. They may not even be around to see the long-term damage. -
Clients Want to Hear "More is Better"
A consultant telling a company “Your devs would be better off doing nothing than what they’re doing now” would not go over well in a boardroom. Companies like to hear "we just need better processes and more efficiency", not "your current output is self-destructive."
Why Developers Know Negative Productivity Intimately:
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They Live with the Consequences
Unlike consultants, developers deal with the aftermath of bad decisions daily—whether it's maintaining spaghetti code, fixing rushed features, or cleaning up someone else’s mess. -
Fixing Problems Created by Others Is Their Job
A huge chunk of software development is not creating new features but fixing problems that should never have existed in the first place. Every developer has seen cases where not touching the code would have been better than implementing a half-baked feature. -
Code Rot and Technical Debt
Developers see firsthand how well-intentioned but poorly executed code creates massive long-term burdens, slowing future work and requiring constant patches. -
The Myth of “Busy = Productive”
Many developers have been forced to write pointless features, follow bad architectures, or over-engineer solutions just to appear busy, knowing full well it hurts the product rather than helps it. -
"Hero Culture" Rewards the Wrong People
Developers often see cases where someone creates a mess, then is praised for heroically fixing it later, when the best move would have been to never create the mess in the first place.
Examples of Negative Productivity in Tech:
- Writing code that is so convoluted that no one else can maintain it.
- Rushing features that introduce critical security vulnerabilities.
- Building unnecessary abstractions that slow down future development.
- Focusing on vanity metrics (e.g., lines of code, PR counts) instead of meaningful progress.
- Adding ceremonial Agile processes that consume more time than they save.
In short, negative productivity is the dark matter of software development—consultants won’t acknowledge it, managers rarely recognize it, but developers feel its gravity every day.
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