Imagine the worker does some work, but it takes ten hours more of other people’s testing to find all the bugs, and ten hours of someone more competent to fix them. Even though he did twenty hours of work, if he never showed up the pace of the work, someone doing it better might not affect others by just being more correct and actually might save others work by organizing the code in a way that is easier to understand.
It is not obvious that people who do a lot of work are actually positively benefiting the overall effort. I’ve certainly had to go and rewrite terrible code before. If it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t need to read it to see if it needed to be rewritten in the first place.
I believe it, but in a different scenario
Imagine the worker does some work, but it takes ten hours more of other people’s testing to find all the bugs, and ten hours of someone more competent to fix them. Even though he did twenty hours of work, if he never showed up the pace of the work, someone doing it better might not affect others by just being more correct and actually might save others work by organizing the code in a way that is easier to understand.
It is not obvious that people who do a lot of work are actually positively benefiting the overall effort. I’ve certainly had to go and rewrite terrible code before. If it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t need to read it to see if it needed to be rewritten in the first place.