Esther Derby has this neat post entitled “People who lower productivity” that reminds me of such a person from my past. He is a relatively famous programmer, is always nice and sociable, but has an ego problem that matches his extreme raw hacking brilliance. Anyway, in the mid-nineties I drew the short straw and got the job of porting some C language Windows 3.1 gui code he had written to Windows 95. It was a giant struggle due to the needless complexity and some odd little quirks. The thing that was sticks in my mind as needlessly difficult was that instead of ORing together symbolic constants for window-styles from windows.h (WS_X | WS_Y) he opened up the header file added the relevant constants together (probably in his head) and then pasted the raw magic number into the C file. Now, I didn’t know if the constant values had changed between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 so I had to spend an hour or so working out what style constants he originally meant and then getting them into the source file. AAARRGHHHHGHHH!
Unfortunately for the company he is back and from all accounts hasn’t changed much. Leopards. Spots.
P.S. This one’s for you Sasha.
I used to puzzle over this for a long time as every job I did I’d always find someone like that. It almost seemed to be some law of economics.
Belbin provides some more evidence but not a reason. The Belbin research identified 8 (later 9) roles that people play in teams with coordination tasks, and explained how they all fit together. One thing that surprised them is that something like 30% of the people they observed showed no positive benefit to the process. The indication was that that many people were make-weights, although I don’t know if they tested that observation seriously.
If you ever get a chance, take (you or your team through) the Belbin process as it enhances understanding of what each person is up to and why. IMO it’s the best of the various psuedo-psych-biz concepts for our area.