Re:How should we handle an over-productive employee?
by oceanplexian on Friday September 09, 2022 @11:00AM
(#32780058)
Intelligence has almost nothing to do with productivity. For example, who's more productive:
Engineer #1, spends 30 hours in a week flawlessly moving an important backend service to a completely new framework, adding complete test coverage, impeccably clean code, clear, readable documentation, and who even gets accolades from their peers for their work.
Engineer #2, spends 2-3 hours reading the code and the code of the dependent services, talks to a few non-development teams about how they use the service, and determines that the backend service never needed to exist, and with a small business process change that will save $1MM a year, convinces a director to nix the entire project.
Engineer #2 was more productive. But to an outside observer, and especially so to highly intelligent, highly productive engineer, #2 will get a massive amount of hate. Since the productive worker archetype almost always focuses on how the work is valuable to them but has a limited sense of direction on how it is valuable to others.
Engineer #1, spends 30 hours in a week flawlessly moving an important backend service to a completely new framework, adding complete test coverage, impeccably clean code, clear, readable documentation, and who even gets accolades from their peers for their work.
Engineer #2, spends 2-3 hours reading the code and the code of the dependent services, talks to a few non-development teams about how they use the service, and determines that the backend service never needed to exist, and with a small business process change that will save $1MM a year, convinces a director to nix the entire project.
Engineer #2 was more productive. But to an outside observer, and especially so to highly intelligent, highly productive engineer, #2 will get a massive amount of hate. Since the productive worker archetype almost always focuses on how the work is valuable to them but has a limited sense of direction on how it is valuable to others.