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Comment by whstl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I've worked with both types. Some prolific devs really do care, and are just really good at their job.

Others are just trying to get code done, and don't care about quality. These are the types that are upset that their code gets rejected because their goal is advancement and money, and not doing a good job.

FWIW, it's okay to care about both. But if you don't care about doing a good job, you're going to drive everyone around you insane.

Prolific bad coders are a bane on the company, and AI is only going to make them worse.

Sure but if PRs get rejected, nobody has to "tidy upp (sic) later".

That's not prolific, that's just producing slop, with AI otherwise.

I'm just tired of developers pretending that low output is some sort of silver bullet for quality, and high-output is automatic slop. Neither are true. In 99% of cases, low output doesn't correlate with anything positive. High-output can naturally go either way, but slop doesn't make one "prolific".

You'll note I didn't actually say it was people who are prolific that were the problem.

I've worked with great prolific devs. They're often very humble, happy to explain their work, and recognise that simply adding to a pile of queued PRs isn't likely to achieve very much. They are part of a team. These are good people.

I've worked with people "who consider themselves prolific humans" - they're far less humble, far more likely to be flexing or showing off. I have less time for them.

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