Negative 10x Developers

Stories from Beyond

The concept of the 10x developer has been in the ether for a while and whether or not they exist is up for debate. What is not up for debate is that the -10x developer exists. I have witnessed them in the flesh. Given the right (or maybe wrong?) environment they can do an astonishing amount of damage to a codebase and a team.

In my case, the developer in question was not unskilled. They were in fact quite good at the basic nuts and bolts of their area of programming and had drive. In fact these traits are probably a prerequisite; someone lacking skill and drive would either no be allowed the scope to do widespread damage or the desire to cause change. However, the person in question had several traits that were less desirable:

• The impression that their skill in one area meant a skill in all areas
• A very opinionated approach to all things
• An aggressive demeanor in enforcing their opinions

These traits combined with a passive manager were a recipe for destruction. Their aggression turned away other engineers who could have provided guard rails and any back channeled feedback to their manager was either ignored or ineffectively impressed on the individual. The remaining junior engineers surrounding them saw the person's baseline of skills and accepted any code as gospel regardless of whether or not it was actually the right idea. Worse was if those same engineers accepted the inappropriate interpersonal behavior as gospel too. Their negative impact on team dynamics cannot be understated.

And in the end thier exploits where a sight to behold:

• An overnight lift and shift of our npm repository to another vendor without talking to anyone, followed by being out of contact the entire next day as everything broke.
• The addition of multiple new libraries that were integrated so deeply into our codebase that extracting them is near impossible once you realize that they were a bad idea.
• Forward looking CSS that ultimately bites you in the most unexpected ways
• Performance "upgrades" to your web server that are the sole source of all your performance issues

Ultimately, regardless of how long a -10x developer is on your team if they are left to their own devices they will bog down the productivity of your team for years to come.