While I don’t doubt the existence of some useless engineers and people secretly working two engineering positions, the fact that they’re claiming 9.5% of engineers are useless based on the output of some code analysis tool and the paper isn’t even published yet makes me think this is junk science. Is their tool going to mark the engineer with decades of institutional knowledge who mainly spends their time helping others as useless? Or the tech lead who is a manager in all but name but doesn’t have time anymore for code?