Overtime Blues - Part II (The Minus Developer)

I read over my original post and there seems to be a lot of blame on management as to why things are late. But I want to make it clear that this is only one out of a many contributing factors that make a project late in which someone has to pull up the slack. Additionally when I talk about overtime I don't mean working a 45 hour week and calling it overtime. A misuse of overtime is working 60-80 hours a week on a constant basis for long stretches of time. Here you have to question what is wrong. So what is another contributing factor that might make a project late which someone is 'required' to do overtime.

Staffing.

(Definitely not my idea)...
On a team everyone mentally ranks each other between a scale of 0 - 10, 10 being the most productive kick ass dev while 0 means the worst unimaginable, wish you never got hired, developer; But, what if we slide the scales to the left to give a better interpretation of what this really means, -5 to +5 rating. In this case if you sum up the team's productivity based upon the rating of all developers you get a clear understanding of who is pulling their weight (0 ranking), who is extremely productive (+3 - +5) and who is dragging the team down. Think back to all the projects that you've done within the past. Have you been on a team with a minus developer? Did you know he/she was a minus developer from the get-go? What did you do about it? Within this mine field of ranking people we tend to really do nothing about it so we do not hurt their feelings. And in almost all cases it really isn't your business as a developer to rate your co-worker, this interaction should be between that developer and their manager. However there is this misconception that labelling a person as a minus developer is negative. In some aspects this is true, but flipping the tables identifying and applying some action on a minus developer is actually a good thing. In most cases firing this person is the last resort, but there are levels of grey which we can explore. Why is this person a minus developer? Usually it’s not about a person's intelligence. If a manager can identify a root cause then potentially this can be fixed. Is the type of project which he/she is working on geared towards a cowboy style developer while this person is a perfectionist? Potentially this person wants to work on low level work but you're making him/her change the background color of an icon on the GUI? Maybe he/she wants to refactor everything to make it better and basically needs a little focus as to the goals of this particular milestone. In any case, ask yourself why you are doing overtime, is it because of someone? Maybe there is something you can do to help this...