{"id":5983,"date":"2014-10-03T02:55:09","date_gmt":"2014-10-02T18:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/?p=5983"},"modified":"2014-10-03T02:55:09","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T18:55:09","slug":"the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong-michael-o-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2014\/10\/03\/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong-michael-o-church\/","title":{"rendered":"The trajectory of a software engineer\u2026 and where it all goes wrong. &#124; Michael O. Church"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The scale I\u2019m about to define comes from one insight about human organizations. Teams, in general, have four categories into which a person\u2019s contribution can fall: dividers, subtracters, adders, and multipliers. Dividers are the cancerous people who have a broad-based negative effect on productivity. This usually results from problems with a person\u2019s attitude or ethics\u2013 \u201cbenign incompetence\u201d (except in managers, whose job descriptions allow them only to be\u00a0multipliers or dividers) is rarely enough to have a \u201cdivider\u201d effect. This is an \u201cHR issue\u201d (dividers must improve or be fired) but not the scope of this professional-development scale, which assumes good-faith and a wish for progress. Subtracters\u00a0are people who produce less than they cost, including the time of others who must coach and supervise them. As a temporary state, there\u2019s nothing wrong with being a subtracter\u2013 almost every software engineer starts out his career as one, and it\u2019s common to be a subtracter in the first weeks of a new job. Adders\u00a0are the workhorses: competent individual contributors who deliver most of the actual work. Finally, multipliers are those who, often in tandem with \u201cadder\u201d contributions, make other people more productive. In many industries, being a multiplier\u00a0is thought to be the province of management alone, but in technology that couldn\u2019t be farther from the truth, because architectural and infrastructural contributions (such as reusable code libraries) have a broad-based impact on the effectiveness of the entire company.<br \/>\nvia <a href=\"http:\/\/michaelochurch.wordpress.com\/2012\/01\/26\/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong\/\">The trajectory of a software engineer\u2026 and where it all goes wrong. | Michael O. Church<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The scale I\u2019m about to define comes from one insight about human organizations. Teams, in general, have four categories into which a person\u2019s contribution can fall: dividers, subtracters, adders, and multipliers. Dividers are the cancerous people who have a broad-based negative effect on productivity. This usually results from problems with a person\u2019s attitude or ethics\u2013 &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/2014\/10\/03\/the-trajectory-of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong-michael-o-church\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The trajectory of a software engineer\u2026 and where it all goes wrong. &#124; Michael O. Church&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[72,73,79,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming","category-psychology","category-reposts","category-society"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/onthe8spot.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}