The bit about improved productivity seems dubious.
One of the problems in this industry is that a lot of teams have no real measure of their actual productivity. We have scrums and points and velocities, but seldom have any way to know how this actually compares to other teams, or any other benchmarks.
I've been dropped in on teams that had spent long periods (in cases years) creating trivial solutions. They were productive in their own way, generating huge volumes of code, had a great sense of satisfaction about their process and a sense of accomplishment, but what they were creating was a week of work for a single person if correctly built. And they happily enjoy their synergy until they are outsourced or eclipsed by competitors.
Maybe I'm sensitive. I've been "the jerk" before. I once had a coworker complain to HR and my boss because she felt that I was domineering. I was domineering in this case because I had opinions and expressed them to the team, and their opinion and suggestion of a new process was that we should have "opinion roundtables" where each participant gets the same amount of time to talk with a timer, etc, and need to suppress any suggestions or opinions outside of that period. I left that team and organization, and eight months later the team was fired.
Following combination would slow them down: "Where a normal review would often contain a handful of comments and suggestions, he would regularly end up in the hundreds." with "Most of the comments were opinion and personal preference. [...] He never took the opportunity to teach or mentor. He just stated his opinions as fact."
That sort of behavior generates a lot of work to the rest of the team - time spend changing the code, time spent discussion opinions and trying proactively writing the code in way that will pass his review. Time spent being confused over why this or that was wrong again (since it was not wrong actually). If those less experienced people feared him, which is likely, they spent a lot of time attempting to anticipate his opinions and preferences (while sacrificing their own opinions and preferences even when they were right).
Moreover, people like him would cause other experienced people to leave. While junior might be fine with being expected to submissively conform to someone elses preferences that much, experienced person wont. "You are doing it wrong" might work on junior, but not on someone who knows that he is not doing it wrong. Anyone who is willing or wanting to take on responsibility would leave.
Yet moreover, he likely regularly shot down good ideas of other people, which would make those other people more passive. It is the same effect as why micromanagement has.
One of the problems in this industry is that a lot of teams have no real measure of their actual productivity. We have scrums and points and velocities, but seldom have any way to know how this actually compares to other teams, or any other benchmarks.
I've been dropped in on teams that had spent long periods (in cases years) creating trivial solutions. They were productive in their own way, generating huge volumes of code, had a great sense of satisfaction about their process and a sense of accomplishment, but what they were creating was a week of work for a single person if correctly built. And they happily enjoy their synergy until they are outsourced or eclipsed by competitors.
Maybe I'm sensitive. I've been "the jerk" before. I once had a coworker complain to HR and my boss because she felt that I was domineering. I was domineering in this case because I had opinions and expressed them to the team, and their opinion and suggestion of a new process was that we should have "opinion roundtables" where each participant gets the same amount of time to talk with a timer, etc, and need to suppress any suggestions or opinions outside of that period. I left that team and organization, and eight months later the team was fired.