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0 pointspawadu9y ago0 comments

> I've also seen negative impact developers. If they did not code, we'd be closer to the finish line than if they did not.

Code? I know people that have caused big projects to fail by just showing up at the meetings. The amount of damage a -10x idiot can do to a project is just mind boggling.

Here is my unsolicited advice to young players: if you end up in a project with a -1x (or worse) guy who is also the darling of the PM or CEO: no matter how hard you work you cannot save this project, don't wait for the shit to hit the fan, give them your two week notice today!

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QuantumGravy9y ago

In my experience, those -10x people don't even have to be developers.

dsacco9y ago

Care to share a war story about someone ruining a project by showing up to a meeting? That's amazing.

pawaduOP9y ago

Here is one you might enjoy:

We had a guy coming into every meeting demanding we produced some low-level internal document for him. We tried to explain to him that (A) our project was not related to his project and (B) we were not comfortable giving anyone an internal implementation document of something that was highly agile.

So this went on for a year and by then the managers were really pissed off that we didn't have the "proper documentation" in place. We spent the next year creating a stable internal API and writing the documents he wanted.

What I learned from all this was that the only way to fix a -10x guy is to fire him. Because despite all this we spent the third year defending internal design decisions from a guy who wasn't even part of the team. In the end he was fired for failing to deliver in his own project - by which time our productivity doubled.

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