[phereford]

I have dealt with the "negative work" conundrum myself and just wanted to give some insight from my point of view on your comment.

1) It isn't always junior level programmers causing the negative work. When it is a junior level programmer, you are 100% correct that part of the blame (or MOST of the blame) falls on the lead/senior programmer. The lead/senior failed the junior without the appropriate structure, code review, etc to make their code maintainable and "healthy". Happened to me just this year and I let down one of the junior engineers on the team in a massive way and it showed.

2) What happens in the scenario that a senior/lead person is the one creating the negative work? Adding more oversight/tighter feedback loops constrains this person and will make them worse off than not. Anyone can make the argument that this person should not be a lead or a senior, but due to any number of business alterations (organizational changes, leadership changes, culture changes, etc) it is 100% a plausible scenario. What do you do then? How do you manage this piece of the puzzle?

Scenario 2 is where I have seen the most "negative work" created without finding optimal paths for fixing the issues at hand.

[jakub_g]

Bonus points if the senior/lead in scenario 2 really, really likes coding, and adds technical debt, bugs and ugly code at a rate faster than the other members can catch up with.