Free loading includes plain slacking, doing things the fun way rather than the good-enough way, playing politics, keeping yourself busy with unnecessary management/coordination, etc.
The reality is much more complicated. I worked with some great people at a huge company, a lot of them had families, one had a child with very severe asthma, and one time only a helicopter could get to the hospital fast enough.
Others had perfectly healthy children... in college, and a huge mortgage on the family home.
They all engaged in counter productive job preservation strategies. The easiest of which is simply to not aggressively share knowledge. At very large companies you really have to actively push your knowledge onto people or a shared knowledge repo.
The next level is to put a very small bit of effort into actively avoiding the sharing of knowledge. Give less than the best answers you can give when asked for information. You don't have to lie or hide, just don't be quite as eloquent as you could be.
At yet another level are things like writing custom wrappers around things that didn't need wrappers, or that already were wrappers themselves.
People were doing this because if they lost their jobs they would lose their homes, the children's heath insurance which can pay for things like helicopters, etc.
Then there's personality conflicts. At very large companies you work with a lot of people and this increases the probability you'll meet your worst match. That is the personality that just happens to clash with your personality. The most common I've seen is very confrontational vs. very passive. The very passive then often becomes as passive aggressive as the other is openly aggressive. And boy can smart people like hackers be incredibly good at passive aggression. The point here is that either of those people would be good on their own. It's the combination that's toxic for them and anyone caught up with them.
And then there's anything other than stellar management. Organizing any large group of people so that communication is effective is not easy. If that large group is programmers and the information is highly complex... you don't have to be bad to mess it up, just not being a great manager is enough.
And there's even more, I could write a large book about this.
When you're stack ranked against your peers, I wonder if people ask themselves, "why should I help you, when all I'm doing is making it harder for myself to get a bonus next year"?. I don't indulge in such behaviour, but I've wondered if others have thought and acted upon it.
Yep, and what I've heard (and only heard, never worked there myself) is that Microsoft has some of the most programmer friendly corporate culture around.
A lot (if not most) big companies are not like that. The reason Joel's writing on company culture is so popular is because such simple things are still quite rare in the world.
I figure this is part of what has kept them around, and is fueling what seems to me to be a come-back in spite of everything going against them.
I don't have a great depth of knowledge on them, but I did interview with their Xbox team, and everyone was just really enthused to be there.
And you shouldn't allow confrontational people on your team anyways -- they can't be in a group (but would properly be awesome on their own).
A lot of great hackers are very confrontation, it comes from love of truth. Look at Linux and Linus Torvalds, Linus freely calls himself an asshole, because well, he is one. Many hackers are.
You can't just magically decide not to work with confrontational people when you're in the software business. Not unless you have infinite amounts of money to hire whomever you want.
Take a look at a farm, what's outside the silo? Rats, rot, waste, what's inside the silo? Stuff you can sell for money that is well protected from the elements. In a large company you need to be a very adept bargainer / barterer to acquire all the resources you need despite the bean counter mentality.
The bigger problem is that it would encourage bitter feeling between teams. If a silo is not successful and freeloaders are not pruned, then there will be a tendency for a silo to sabotage another silo if they think their collective job security is at risk. It is not a perfect solution. It can be approximated but still actually separate small companies is what makes more sense.
In cases like that you can improve productivity by actually cutting the team's size and pairing less important features.
Some programmers, in some environments, are negative net productivity programmers. If some programmers literally get nothing accomplished at all, then you can easily say that "some programmers are 10^3 or 10^6 or 10^100 times more productive than others"
Another factor in "rockstar" productivity is that you need to get all the bull out of the requirements gathering process. I've seen so many places where it takes six hours of time working with "customers" to figure out the requirements for something that takes 6 minutes to implement. Tasks that are absolutely trivial can stretch on for weeks if your organization can't be decisive about getting them done.
Of course, in large teams there's a lot more bull to go around.
And a thirty person team is not only more likely to have several interns, but also people who spend a significant amount of time training, mentoring, and managing them.