Productivity Ratios and Negative Producers

Numerous management studies have found there can be a 10-to-1 ratio difference in productivity between engineers.

Of course, the widest performance spread can be greater than 10-to-1 if you take into account your worst engineers. Technically it could be 100-to-1, or infinity. In fact, the math can break down if your worst engineer is a net negative producer.

How does an engineer exhibit negative productivity? Typically they write awful code that causes breakages and which have to be cleaned up by teammates. Or they may waste time in meetings arguing contrarian positions just because they like to yank peoples’ chains.

As a manager it is your job to isolate these negative producers and insulate your team from them. Ideally you’d show these people out the door, but there are usually complicating factors that keep them at their jobs longer than you’d like.

Also, it’s important not to blind yourself to the possibility that it might not be the individual that’s at fault for negative productivity. It could be the environment, or the team chemistry, or the nature of the technical problem being tackled. As I mentioned previously, a person can be a star in one realm and flounder in another environment. It’s up to the manager to spot these problems and do everything possible to mitigate them.