9.5% of software engineers are ghosts | Hacker News Reader

9.5% of software engineers are ghosts

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20 pointscoredog6410 comments

It is difficult to accurately evaluate software engineer productivity. I don’t question there are developers who get by doing absolutely nothing. However, only analyzing git commits doesn’t consider other aspects of software engineering such as producing design docs, code reviews, planning, support, etc. If you try to evaluate the performance of individuals just based on git commits alone, you risk making terrible decisions.

Yes but it’s not like those producing code don’t do those other things. You would expect typical commits to reflect the time lost to other typical activities right?

Maybe you’ve worked on better teams than I have. There are some folks who only care about their feature and getting their JIRA item across the board vs the quality of the product they are building and the overall health of the team. Some of these types may have more commits, but they’re not always great team players or great people to work with.

Metrics might suggest these engineers are the most valuable and productive, but in reality, they can be a significant drain on teams and projects. They don’t actively participate in code reviews, show little concern for performance and code quality, and rarely contribute to support efforts or keeping dependencies current. Their lack of collaboration and accountability makes them challenging teammates and ultimately hinders the team’s success. There’s more to being a good software engineer and teammate than the number of and size of commits.

This is inevitable when senior leadership has lost all touch with reality and no longer knows what reasonable expectations are or "what good looks like".

It's because they are in meetings all day. I've spoken with an engineer in this situation, and I doubt he is unique.

The meetings all day crowd is self-selecting.

If I knew a developer who was doing this, I'd never admit it unless I was under duress.

Why shouldn't workers do everything they can to get ahead in a country where you can make six figures and still be living paycheck to paycheck?

Sure, it might be unethical, but I'll worry about the ethics of "overemployment" when CEOs go to Death Row for wage theft.

This doesn’t surprise me. The worse scores for remote work highlight the importance of good management and mindful measurement of productivity. Especially with some suspected of working multiple jobs as mentioned in here.

So many billions of dollars will be lost because of this, like scrum before it! Commits, without context, don't say much. Eager companies will try to follow this and just create a cobra effect.

The other 42% make trivial changes, like editing one line or character--pretending to work.

Sure commits are not a perfect metric but let's not pretend that it's completely opaque.

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