14% of software engineers working remotely do almost no work (Ghost Engineers)

Reminds me of the novel The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère.

I have worked with people who got away with this. One guy said he had some severe disorder that prevented him attending meetings or even talking directly to people for more than a few minutes. He worked from the network closet (seriously). He almost never responded to emails or other communication, and when asked about his progress would say he had other more important things to do, without elaborating. Normal human empathy, and probably worries about ADA lawsuits, meant that everyone just left him alone, apparently to do nothing.

Another guy got hired as a junior and stayed in perpetual onboarding mode, asking for help and mentoring but never producing anything. He seemed friendly and eager, but just never lifted off. That went on for over a year, with the rest of the team and the managers trying to help him get up to speed. Again no one wanted to call the guy out because he seemed sincere in wanting to participate. Eventually he got laid off, and only then did we find out that he had done the same thing at his previous job -- his former manager gave him a glowing reference just to get rid of him.

I think a variation of this gets called the "expert beginner," a person who gets into a loop with their skill development, stuck and never able to move forward with the rest of the team. If lucky they get put on legacy support duty, fixing old dusty code that no one cares about and the rest of the business has routed around, so they look busy but have no clear performance metrics or deliverables anyone cares about.

I had a manager once who seemed to always have other things to do. He would disappear all day, tell us he was off-site at the distribution center or a meeting or something. He cleverly delegated his work, and then took credit for successes (but never any blame for failures). Turned out he spent that time building a recording studio in his home and making rock music demos. I went to lunch with him once, that lasted over four hours because we went to two guitar stores after a long meal.

Don’t need to be remote to do a whole lot of nothing. Being a bench warmer in the office is absolutely possible

When I came to the office, I would check in at the entrance. So the director would see that I had come to work. However, if I was feeling unwell, for example, if I hadn't slept well at night, I could sit all day just staring at the monitor. And I was also very tired on the road, getting there for three hours by transport, and coming home very late. When I worked remotely, I tried to work better. I saved a lot of time on the road. I like working remotely more. Once I worked for a month to build a system in C#, Docker in Windows. Because different versions work differently, I had to look for a lot of information. I made great progress in assembling the system, added useful recommendations to the documentation, but after a month I was fired because they wanted high speed work. Recently I was asked to do the layout of a website page. I said that I could do it in a week, but they told me to do it in 1 day. This is actually a very strict requirement, and I cannot do it faster than I do. A person should rest more often!

I would love somebody to post a better source than X for this work. I have questions. I tried search on his name but it's not finding the paper. Google scholar for him doesn't have this work.

I've worked with a great many professional schmoozers who go to the office and do almost no work. They're great at being seen and networking, but very poor at actually delivering anything.