When I was at Microsoft, I encountered the phenomenon of the -1x engineer. The people who threw a load of code at projects that then took at least one full-time engineer to fix bugs in and refactor. These people were often rapidly moved to positions where they could do less immediate damage, such as going to cross-group design meetings. Unfortunately, this raised their profile and got them promotions and transfers to other teams who did not initially know how much damage they’d done in their previous team.

Interestingly, if you look at commits, these people had the exact opposite profile to the so-called ‘ghost engineers’. The people fixing their bugs would often make a load of single-line changes, they would be the ones throwing a thousand lines of spaghetti into the repo at a time. Often, it wasn’t just that the code was bad, it was the design was fundamentally flawed and they were solving entirely the wrong problem, but they wrote a lot of code and so looked productive.

The best engineers increase functionality or performance and write a net negative volume of code.