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@ asyncmind
2025-01-29 00:39:27
Negative 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:
1. **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.
2. **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**.
3. **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.
4. **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."**
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### Why Developers Know Negative Productivity Intimately:
1. **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**.
2. **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.**
3. **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.
4. **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.
5. **"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**.
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### 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**.