Tech Companies Are Awash in 'Ghost Engineers,' Researcher Says

> His algorithm attempts to resolve that tension, giving high ratings to engineers who write many lines of code only so long as that code is maintainable, solves complex problems, and is easy to implement.

If current tools are incapable of generating code beyond a certain level of complexity with consistent accuracy, then how are they capable of accurately judging human output? This reads like a puff piece citing some person’s unreviewed, “Microsoft management in a black box” algorithm.

About 10% sounds about right not just for software engineers but the workforce as a whole. Of course the proliferation of this story is the exact thing we didnt need in this tech hiring recession.

The real takeaway is that there's such a thing as a 50x developer. Ghosts are 10x less effective than median and superstar remote devs are 5x more effective than median.

What's the end game? Make people write more high quality, high complexity code with less time?

I don't think that's how it works. You can try to juice the rock as much as you want, but you can only choose any two of the three IMO. It's a structural constraint of making humans write code. If they end up creating code generating machines that can do this, good for them. But until then it'd serve everyone better if people just accepted reality.

If managers are doing their job, how is this possible?

Now do Non technical people in highly technical roles that are hiding in plain sight.