> .... a fairly large amount of that "productivity" is fixing mistakes a more focused programmer would have avoided
Holy cow this hits home. I've been on a number of teams like this going back years (decades) and ... I just don't get it. Had I been 'allowed' another 30 minutes, or an hour, or a day, on problem X... we'd have avoided weeks of unraveling problems later. But... no - gotta keep pressing on, hitting those pre-defined deadlines at all costs.
Deadline Driven Development is foolish. Deadlines are good to have, but you cannot force good functioning software if more time is needed to craft it. You get what you pay for, you reap what you sow. If you just want to churn out code in unrealistic time spans instead of extended efforts, you're going to get a bad product. Instead, cut things that can come out later, have developers focus on polish. I would rather a very stable and polished MVP over a rushed dumpster fire as a dev an end-user who has seen some awful.
Holy cow this hits home. I've been on a number of teams like this going back years (decades) and ... I just don't get it. Had I been 'allowed' another 30 minutes, or an hour, or a day, on problem X... we'd have avoided weeks of unraveling problems later. But... no - gotta keep pressing on, hitting those pre-defined deadlines at all costs.