> I've worked with people who consider themselves 'prolific humans'. Someone always has to tidy upp later, and its never them

I run both infrastructure and security - that means a lot of relatively self-contained PRs to infrastructure-as-code and dependency management systems. I'm also the team lead, which makes me responsible for a lot of throwaway prototyping, as well as cleaning up anyone else's mess...

Yes, the prolific-but-damaging engineers are all too common in corporate. But particularly in startup land, you tend to find your high-performers wearing a lot of hats at once.

My experience is that it's even worse: they've already produced enough code that the codebase matches their taste and theirs alone.

So in essence you have one guy working at 4x and e.g. four other getting just 0.7x - net effect is still positive, but everyone save for that one person is miserable.

Mind you, the 4x dev doesn't necessarily have to be particularly talented - they only need to get their foot in the door before anyone else.

Back during the ZIRP days you could immediately tell that this is the case in a team by staff rotation alone. Nowadays people understandably cling to their jobs, so you might now know until it's too late.

> … and its never them

IME, it’s because they lack the experience to have the Taste one develops as a senior engineer. “This works, and is somewhat understandable” is as far as they get. Little to no understanding of how this solution could fit better in the codebase.

There's also those that burn themselves out, and John Carmack!

That's such bullshit.

I've managed some incredibly prolific developers and some very slow ones, and the prolific ones are pretty much always the ones more available, more willing to fix things, more willing to take feedback.

And also: they make less mistakes because their skills are sharp. This anecdote comes to mind: https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...

If you have to constantly rationalize performance differences by demeaning others, this says more about you than the prolific people.