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As a previous so-called ‘ghost engineer’, it took three people to replace me, and four months for damage control when I wasn’t there to keep things in top shape. There was documentation to keep things running, but since I wrote that documentation and “my contributions weren’t necessary foe the team’s success” Well. Why leave them?
That rate seems high. But, I have done post-mortems on a bad developer’s run at a company, and found they did very nearly nothing. No commits, no issues opened or closed, some comments, but that was almost their entire digital footprint.
Most developers I’ve worked with are obviously not doing nothing, though some of us (including myself) get stuck doing a lot of work on a project that never makes it into production due to shifting priorities.
Yup. I’m a senior software dev, and some weeks I write no code at all. Sometimes that’s because I’m researching something (output is a doc a/ estimates), other times it’s code reviews, and other times I’m stuck in meetings all week.
But most weeks I’ll write some code, even if it’s just fixing some tech debt. If someone isn’t contributing for a month, they’re definitely not doing their job.
Our most critical dev / solutions expert spends most weeks in meetings.
That’s our architect, and they’re not a dev (they don’t even do code reviews), but they are quite critical because it’s their job to understand the entire app, including in-progress changes from other teams. They have their own team (architecture), so they don’t report on any dev team, they report to the director.
Maybe that’s what others are calling a “lead dev”?
Seems to be a trend, my boss was telling me that the VP’s in our org think we need more lead devs and less solutions architects, though they would functionally be doing largely the same role, meetings, planning, design, interfacing with teams they are dependent on, annual technology reviews etc. I think it’s going to bite them in the end
I imagine hiring will be an issue. Devs want to dev, and naming an architect role a “dev” role doesn’t communicate the role properly.
Yep, they talked about it a bit during my hiring what I wanted my title to be since they are paid the same and do the same tasks(in addition to some coding expectations). I’m glad I chose architect, but ultimately they squeezed me out of that with RTO mandates for architects and above.
I’m one of those who “do nothing”, if you’re measuring by commits and lines of code.
- as an architect, I spend way too much time doing diagrams and presentation
- as a point of engineering escalation, I spend a lot of time researching things no one can figure out
- as a stickler for code quality, I like nothing more than those days where my lines of code are negative
On the other hand, if you go by the amount of code I indirectly effect with best practices, code quality, appsec, and assisting developers, I affect all of engineering (hundreds)
And that’s obvious from the very beginning, when you look at how human collectives work. You never can determine who really does nothing.
Even if we imagine this is somehow possible, there are social predators, as in psychopaths or at least scheming jerks, in every one of them, who don’t want a transparent structure of responsibility. And there’s the majority of us who rely on their kind to handle the social dynamics we don’t want. And there’s need for some stability.
But all that aside, engineers would be the last group in my list to check for people “doing nothing”. Almost everyone eager to discuss engineers “doing nothing” would fit higher there.
I’ve seen a couple that have had like one or two trivial commits in the half year it took for them to get laid off. Idk what kind of manager did not solve whatever was going on there. I guess getting laid off is a solution, too.
No, but I want to be one.
People do something, but often it’s the wrong thing, and essentially nothing, or worse than nothing
Tldr the original article is all based off the findings of AI trying to evaluate the efficiency of code contributions. And from the little i looked at it, it seems to fall apart pretty quickly after that.
It’s really astonishing how an entire article written using an AI-based metric is taken seriously, let alone discussed at length. Well, it probably plays into existing biases, which is likely the reason for its existence in the first place.
I’ve seen this claim recently and it’s rubbish.
Yes, if by “nothing” we mean writing next to no code, because they’re busy either:
- architecting software solutions, as they’re knowledgeable enough that they should be doing this instead of writing code
- understanding a lot of what is going on in components and/or the system so that when there’s an issue they say “oh, this is likely because of X” and the resolution takes days instead of weeks.
I.e. yes, there is a percentage of developers who we pile other tasks on and they don’t get to write code.
My experience is that the more knowledgeable developers get, the less code they write.
Then neurodivergent peeps are different - an Autistic dev might be super knowledgeable and happy writing unit tests because they don’t enjoy the uncertainty of large problems, or an ADHD developer might have a large system-wide view but write what seem like small contributions.
Or have incessant meetings with Senior management or Business Unit leadership to keep them in the loop or even constrain their unrealistic expectations.
Yeah… How many “ghost devs” don’t produce much code because they area stuck in meeting after meeting that they don’t need to be in just in case “someone has a tech question”?
You’re talking about people who work at a high level and might not type that much code. Thats definitely a thing.
I’ve also got a junior front line engineer on my team who does literally nothing. It takes them 10x too long to do anything and they require so much help from seniors than it would be faster for them to do it themselves. One of the seniors told me “a sure fire way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to give it to them.”
But gosh, it isn’t 10% of them that are like this. No way. This person is 1 in 500.
I am number 2.
Well, you are what you eat, and so is your poo.
Crack a window, buddy.
We recently got moved under someone who leads call center operations and they’re wanting to apply similar metrics to the devs to “ensure they’re being productive the entire time”. I told them that there’s lots of work they do outside the normal 9-5 and that you can’t just measure what someone does by lines of code created else you’ll end up with a 30 line if statement instead of a for each letter loop, but they don’t seem to care. If things get implemented I’m just waiting for the shit show it’ll cause.
Yup. I judge devs by problems solved (bugs fixed, features implemented) based on initial estimate and actual delivery time. If they’re consistently off, they either need help with estimation (I’ll tell them to increase estimates) or they aren’t doing their job. I don’t care if the solution is 1 lines or 1000 lines (well, I prefer less code), I care if they feel confident in their estimate before starting work, and if they’re able to deliver close to their estimate. I also care what others on the team think about their estimate, and I’ll review anything that seems out of whack.
And this is why I refuse to work anywhere where the people managing devs don’t have dev experience. My boss was a dev, and they’re fantastic at catching me on my BS, which tells me I’m being fairly evaluated. I can’t ask for more than that.
I knew a guy who worked at microsoft and basically did all of his work for the week in a couple of hours and then spent the entire rest of the week playing VR
If in the end he does at least as much work as the average coworker and has no responsibility to be instant available then i see no problem with this.
Energy is not the same for everyone. My autistic ass can move actual mountains of work between 7-8am without feeling a thing. But holding a basic conversation in the afternoon is too much and could cause me to having to call someone to drive me home.
NT often assume i should converse energy in the morning and then i will have energy in the afternoon but nope. trying to do so makes me even more drained because things move to slow. I’d just be wasting time.
Oh yeah absolutely, he’s extremely good at what he does, but he was working at a company that was absorbed by microsoft and essentially just fell through the cracks for 2 or 3 years until he went to a new company.
obligatory Betteridge’s law of headlines
Has an MBA ever contributed anything of value?
Statistically speaking, a few of them definitely fucked up at some point and accidentally did the right thing. Or committed suicide.
There is a difference between productivity and activity, you can be 100% active at work all day, yet 0% productive. Imagine you work on a project for 6 months and then the manager decide to drop the project. You have been unproductive for 6 months, doesn’t mean you were slacking off, but in the end when we calculate the productivity of developers, it is lower because of this.
This is actually a pretty good analysis. I love that she clarifies it’s not a research paper, but a “canva infographic.” Spot on.
She doesn’t mention that the MBA professor who authored the infographic also seems to contract with FounderPartners, a VC consulting firm.
So this is really an ad for his side gig; “Pay us lots of money, and we’ll justify your layoffs with sciency mumbo jumbo.🌈😘📈”
I didn’t watch this yet, but the title matches with the article this company published how their LLM model discovered this, but they (the authors) don’t even fully understand how this was calculated. Basically, using AI for AI’s sake.
Edit. Found it.
Edit 2. Here’s the original Lemmy post, if you’re interested. (I don’t know how to bang-link a Lemmy post…)
She found the original, properly written article that has a healthy discussion about quality of commits, and had no mention of productivity
If I had to put money one which an MBA or a software engineer doing jack shit at work. I’d lean pretty heavily towards the MBA.
I’m pretty sure the reason we don’t see the engineer side is because the engineers are focused on problems solving. The other groups are more focused on selling and conveying information. If that’s your job you are going to be much better at shifting attention scrutiny to other groups.
