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I may be an oddball, but in over 15 years I have yet to work with such a person (as a team member at least; middle management is a different story). That includes almost ten years at ablarge defense contractor. I worked with plenty who provided little positive value, but everyone I worked with provided some.



> ...I have yet to work with such a person...

I have absolutely worked with bad architects who dreamed up giant frameworks that had basically all the features of an operating systems. In the end, the whole project had to be scrapped. And all the other developers had to be (slowly) retrained to learn that <smart architect> was wrong about many things.

I have absolutely worked with bad individual contributors that likewise wasted other peoples' time through shoddy work or a lack of empathy for other individual contributors. Often they ended up working on infrastructure groups, but they could work anywhere.

I have also worked with egotistical engineers that liked pedantry and debate over actual work. If you wanted to get things done, you basically learned how to avoid their input before shipping.

There are lots of other examples here. I didn't even go into different kinds of net-negative managers.


And even if it seemed to you that they weren't doing much, you'd need to know them very very well to say that with any confidence.




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