"Last week, a tweet by Stanford researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanch went viral within Silicon Valley. “We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies,” he tweeted. “~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers.”
Denisov-Blanch said that tech companies have given his research team access to their internal code repositories (their internal, private Githubs, for example) and, for the last two years, he and his team have been running an algorithm against individual employees’ code. He said that this automated code review shows that nearly 10 percent of employees at the companies analyzed do essentially nothing, and are handsomely compensated for it. There are not many details about how his team’s review algorithm works in a paper about it, but it says that it attempts to answer the same questions a human reviewer might have about any specific segment of code, such as:
“How difficult is the problem that this commit solves?
How many hours would it take you to just write the code in this commit assuming you could fully focus on this task?
How well structured is this source code relative to the previous commits? Quartile within this list
How maintainable is this commit?”
Ghost Engineers, as determined by his algorithm, perform at less than 10 percent of the median software engineer (as in, they are measured as being 10 times worse/less productive than the median worker)."
https://www.404media.co/are-overemployed-ghost-engineers-making-six-figures-to-do-nothing/
#SoftwareDevelopment #GhostEngineers #Surveillance #Overemployment #Programming
They are probably senior engineers helping the rest of the team, going to meetings, organizing scrums, dealing with product, breaking down jira tickets into manageable tasks, dealing with vendors, doing production support, interviewing new candidates. There is more to engineering than just commits. 10% of the median does not mean you are a slacker.
Yeah, you've just described me.
I spend almost all of my time:
The way I think of it, much of what I do is unnecessary busywork made necessary only by the dumb rules invented by C-level people. The rest of what I do that actually contributes to the team's success (I like the word "success" over "productivity", but my employer doesn't so much think in those terms) has, rather than an additive effect on velocity, a multiplicative effect. If I spend an hour helping someone else, it's probably going to save them well more than an hour of banging their heads against a wall.
Yeah this is dumb