Sketchy Stanford study says 9.5% of programmers are "ghosts"...

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A recent study from Stanford University claims that 9.5% of programmers are ghosts who do almost zero work. Let's also look at other recent developments in AI, like the Sora API leak, Microsoft Recall, and more.
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[@danhorus]

I read that guy's paper and his research is so bad! He tried to use git commits to predict things like developer experience, coding time, and end-to-end implementation time, but instead of measuring these labels in the real world, he asked 10 "expert raters" to GUESS the answers. Not only that, 7 of these raters are actually managers/execs, which means they may not be touching code for quite a while now. The sample size is also really small, with only 70 commits, and the raters don't even agree on metrics like the developer's experience, code maintainability, and good structure. Still, the author took those responses and used them to train a Random Forest model to predict similar responses for new commits -- the only problem is that Random Forest models CANNOT READ CODE, so it's IMPOSSIBLE for this model to have ANY understanding of code quality

[@alec3107]

This is a damn impressive comment considering it's only 10 minutes after the video dropped lol

[@sirloin869]

hahaha

[@nek729]

​@@alec3107what if it was made with ai lol

[@braineaterzombie3981]

Damn that's terrible job to do any kind of inferencing, but at the same time i think its not completely his fault. It is also job of reviewers to look at research and make conclusions whether this is an important news headline or not , more often than not people just report completely different from what is original suggested

[@dankmememayn]

@@alec3107 the paper has been out longer than this video you know?

[@Caphalem]

1) Become a super star dev 2) Get invited to ALL of the meetings because you know everything 3) Get fired because you didn't press enough buttons because you were in the meetings

[@UriGerhard]

bonus points for every meeting that could have been an email

[@JH-bb8in]

@ your job is to make others feel productive attending meetings

[@jessejayphotography]

This is why I left the industry. Write code to make a product so someone can take a 50% salary bonus at the end of the year and then let you go because you didn’t commit enough code.

[@iamhereblossom1588]

@@jessejayphotographywhat do you do now? Photography?

[@jessejayphotography]

@@iamhereblossom1588 No, its my hobby.

[@adambickford8720]

As a senior dev, I spend enormous amounts of time mentoring and reviewing. Not only does that leveling up of the team not get a nice little metric, but many of those other dev's commits are my solutions just misattributed. When I do actually get to write code, it's going to be the gnarliest parallel/concurrent tasks we have. Guess what? That takes a lot longer to write than scaffolding up a new rest endpoint Mr 10x. Go ahead and fire me, prove you're the bad manager we all know you are.

[@hotworlds]

Last job as a lead dev, frequently a week would go by where my day would start with an hour of responding to emails, two hours on a Skype call with a jr dev, three hours of meetings, another hour of emails at the end of the day, and with short breaks in between these things it's time to go home. That's zero commits all week while about 70% of my time was solving everyone's problems and answering questions and the other 30% was mandatory BS. Only time I'd actually get to do some coding was on Monday and Friday when people weren't scheduling so many meetings.

[@LuisSierra42]

Sorry, my LLM found that you don't spend enough time coding to be considered a productive engineer

[@rodrigovaccari7547]

@@hotworlds Judging commits as productivity is such an ignorant way to approach it. I can commit a spaghetti recipe in the code, then commit me adding a comma, then commit me deleting it. It literally means not a single thing other than something was done directly on code.

[@oafkad]

Just wait till they make an AI that shows just how many managers aren't necessary. You'd lose the

[@DefaultFlame]

@@rodrigovaccari7547 "How many times did you press backspace? Oh, it's X% above the average? You're fired." Don't you love that we live in the most boring cyberpunk dystopia?

[@divad1196]

9.5% of devs are actually thinking instead of writing non-sense

[@rompis.a]

A real dev spends about 70% of their development time wringing their brains out reading documentations, figuring out architecture design, and deciphering Indian accents on KZbin. Only 30% is spent writing the code.

[@eshku]

@@rompis.a thinking about architecture design, ha, no way, I'm gonna just make something that works, add more and more functionality, until I bump my way into lots of problems, figure out how to make it work again, changing architecture completely and rewriting whole code several times, because I definitely know what I'm doing. I'm gonna be tha best dev for that AI. So many keystrokes, sooo many commits, so little thinking ahead...

[@cate01a]

the productivity score seems to be based off how useful the code you generate is, not simply how many lines

[@xBanki]

@@eshku We're witnessing an escape from the Matrix in real time, ladies and gentlemen

[@Edward55221]

I think its funny when stupid people use AI as a crutch instead of using their brains and then it bites them in the ass.

[@MmeliDyantyi]

sometimes you spend weeks trying to figure out a few lines of code, it is not just about writing code mindlessly but actually creatively solving very specific problems

[@J-Kimble]

And not to mention sometimes it takes days to pin down the exact requirements because most companies have atrocious planning.

[@DavidTector]

Huh...

[@JesusPlsSaveMe]

​@@J-Kimble Where are you going after you die? What happens next? Have you ever thought about that? Repent today and give your life to Jesus Christ to obtain eternal salvation. Tomorrow may be too late my brethen😢. Hebrews 9:27 says "And as it is appointed unto man once to die, but after that the judgement

[@patsagonsaechin3006]

@@JesusPlsSaveMe Will Jesus gives me free Luce plushie?

[@TreesPlease42]

100% if you're typing more than you're thinking, then it's not a hard problem -- and that's okay, but it's not a measure of productivity

[@australianman8566]

I am genuinely tired of all the Clerk ads. Don't trust a company that locks you in with no way of leaving with something as sensitive as user management. There are much better alternatives.

[@IsaiahMutex]

For example?

[@thedragonrises6882]

​@@IsaiahMutexKeycloak

[@SlimShady-gs8pl]

Zitadel for me, which is also FOSS, well-audited, and used in a lot of EU governments. Keycloak is heavy and pretty much requires weeks of training to figure out how it all works. But I do love Redhat.

[@fred.flintstone4099]

@@IsaiahMutex I guess Okta is an alternative. I don't know if it is better or worse though. It is great Clerk have a bazillion different login providers but for most people you probably only need one or two, maybe three.

[@peterszarvas94]

just learn auth and make your own, then reuse it in multiple apps. its fun and not so difficult, but takes time ofc

[@rekcce]

I am in my third month as a senior ghost sofware engineer at my new job. It is not my fault, they hired me because they were "negotiating" a lot of projects but no deal is closed yet. No meetings, no reports, no code reviews, no legacy code, no deadlines, nothing they just pay me. My boss just call me once a week to apologize for putting me in standby and said maybe next week things will start to move (the same routine since the fist week). I would prefer to have a goal, own a project or at least mentor someone. First month was full of uncertainty and anxiety, but now I start to enjoy it but not for the lack of work but because it give me the opportunity to study and take courses to upgrade my skills, work on some personal projects and yes, I am already looking for another job just in case. I have been in several companies at different job positions and I can say this type of problems (and others related) are consequence of poor management and bad executive decisions, but hey! lets blame the developers for not been productive enough. By the way, I loudly laughed and then sadly cry as an Electrical Engineer that spent ages learning MATLAB to never use it on their career; well I still use it for my personal (non-paid) projects.

[@holeefuk8535]

Let me guess, you're american?

[@BHBalast]

Helo fellow EE, i never liked MATLAB, in my region of the world it was just too pricy for small and medium companies for what it offers, now I just use python. I wonder what did you used in exchange for MATLAB while you were working as an EE?

[@anonymous-ui7il]

@@BHBalast For computer vision, linear algebra and machine learning, libraries/frameworks like numpy, tensorflow, pytorch, opencv provide enough equivalent coverage and implement the same functions in MATLAB pretty well. There is no need for MATLAB. Many 2D, 3D, nD visualization libraries also exist in python like matplotlib.

[@bloozy85]

haha so true, i experienced this in some previous jobs ... be careful to tell doubts or criticize ^^ ... they will immediately lay you off :D

[@PunishedFelix]

I had a job like this but instead of being in project limbo the people who ran the place were idiots who had no idea how to construct any protocol on development or managing tickets. I basically had to go in blind with undocumented completely in house software, it was nuts. So for many periods I would just catch up on research and pretend to work because they had no way of noticing and then one week I would just finish a bunch of loose ends. Honestly if they just let me do that and stopped assigning vague or completely idiotic projects I would still be working there. 30 months of my life just gone to that crap

[@victorportable3892]

1) Get a keyboard emulator that prints a given text file as keyboard strokes. 2) Copy/Paste the the biggest Git-Repo you can find into the input file 3) Write a little bash/shell script that starts this emulator in a word file every weekday from 8 to 6 4) Go on vaction for 3 months 5) Come back and have 4 raises, 2 promotions, +100 hours overtime while all the normies in your company got fired. 6) Go on vacation again with your overtime.

[@rubyciide5542]

What the fuck 8-6 that's absurd

[@_denzy_6310]

Then get fired after being caught doing this 😅

[@ZSNOF]

@@_denzy_6310 *wipes tears with money*

[@olfmombach260]

​@@_denzy_6310 oh noooo

[@KewalTailor]

Lol, true

[@jakub2631]

AlbertaTech talked about this and apparently it's just management bs

[@ForChiddlers]

Yeah, she has outdone Fireship pretty quick

[@nayber2352]

yeah, because she's actually a developer

[@XDarkGreyX]

​@@nayber2352 he used to be a dev only and a dev first for many years. Stop hate watching

[@ashishbarthwal6961]

​@@XDarkGreyX ikr lol

[@lukealadeen7836]

She's so cute ❤

[@JH-bb8in]

My experience with Clerk has been awful. Gets expensive very quick, plus they use all sorts of dark patterns to make it hard to cancel.

[@gringo5282]

Not to mention the random outages, poor performance, and added latency for almost no benefit. At one point, a startup I worked for was spending upwards of $1500/mo on Clerk. I replaced their authentication system with a custom self-hosted implementation, and the cost dropped down to around $80/mo for the server it was running on.

[@MrJgracias]

Is this a commercial? ✋️

[@UriGerhard]

@@MrJgracias I see it more as a suggestion to write your own Clerk, with blerkjack and hookers

[@NoOne-fe3gc]

AlbertaTech had a video on this, apparently that infografic is a gross distortion of the study which isn't even related to ghost engineers?

[@rhydonphilip]

I am also curious where he got the remote work productivity data from. Most I find detail the oppositie, all be it ones dating from 2020-2022.

[@GSBarlev]

Given how I get most of my breaking news from Jeff, it's pretty awesome, not only that Alberta scooped him, but that she's got enough of a following that a huge portion of the top comments are talking about how she already covered this!

[@bluefrancis14]

​​@@GSBarlev may I know what channel you guys are talking about?

[@GSBarlev]

@@bluefrancis14 It's *@AlbertaTech* just as it says in OC's post.

[@bluefrancis14]

@@GSBarlev Oh, I though it was name of a company. Thanks!

[@Karaffka]

In nature, up to 40% of worker ants are idle.

[@Flatchlenter]

40% of the colony is idle at any given time. That doesn't mean those same 40% are idle all the time.

[@SD7productions]

If human race had the work ethic of ants, we would have colonized the solar system by now.

[@Blaze6108]

Yep. And it's not for a bad reason either: normally, ants just don't have enough work to do to 'employ' 100% of the colony. However, the reason they are organized this way is that when an extreme work surge becomes needed (famine, war, flood...), they can muster a 40% workforce increase instantly with fresh, rested workers, and save their little six-legged souls.

[@ytjoemoore94]

Ants share identical DNA and only benifit their offspring by contributing. If they are idle it's for a good reason.

[@HUEHUEUHEPony]

We shouldn't have everyone the same 9 to 5

[@bengrzybowski2487]

Corporations want to justify RTO so bad they have to pay "researchers" at Stanford to try and prove their point. Wonder how much it cost to get that joke of a paper released.

[@xmarkclx]

What's really funny is that they could have paid a few extra to get a few more people answering the survey. Hell, they can send some of their employees and tell those employees what to say.

[@Neuvalence]

4:20 last time a company implemented a screen monitoring-tracking system, i left two weeks after the micromanaging ensued. was a slap in the face.

[@Sajgoniarz]

When i was an intern my boss figured out that installing tracking software will make him better in predictions to our clients. He later called me to the office and asked why do i spent all time on FB. "I was doing FB integrations for all of our clients last two weeks". He made fake "i understand face". At start of the next week we had to uninstall thst soft 😂

[@ICoDIAlmar21]

So the only way to combat this is to fill their test datasets with unproductive work tagged as productive. Got it.

[@nestwr]

Wow, what a genius study. It's not like engineers don't have other responsibilities. Say one out of ten engineers having access to code bases, but also being the team lead, who manages SCRUM, client requirements and tracks contributions of the engineers under them. Or maybe it's a DevOps engineer, who only very occasionally needs to put changes into team repos, spending most of their time in GUIs. I look forward to all the boomer team leads thinking the study is about their subordinates and making their lives even harder. 🤦‍♂

[@proosee]

It's not about being boomer or not, it's about intelligence - I've seen young people thinking that the number of commits they make daily is a measure of their productivity.

[@ForChiddlers]

They used line counts to measure productivity 😂😂😂😂

[@superdingo9741]

Wow, what a genius comment. The study is about programmers, but 'maybe it's a DevOps engineer'. 🥴

[@ForChiddlers]

@superdingo9741 it's from an MBA, so probably for him it's just a computer guys study🤣🤣

[@traveller23e]

@@proosee I was a bit like that after my first job. It's an easy trap to fall into when you're in a hellscape with lots of poorly thought out small stories vastly underestimated and strong pressure to do things faster. In my second job the project was well-managed and my scrum master (and immediate boss) was absolutely amazing. A lot of what I learned in the first months in that place could be summerised with the sentence "slow down, don't worry, no one hates you, try to come up with the best long-term solution even if it means taking twice as long".

[@kyomawolf2]

A sample size of 10 is really nothing tbh

[@proosee]

Hah! 10! That would be actually something, but they get only 3 developers in that 10!

[@australianman8566]

10 is absolutely nothing.

[@crusaderanimation6967]

Isn't good study performed on sample size of like (lower) few thousand ? Like between 1.5 and 3 k ?

[@proosee]

@@crusaderanimation6967 the sample size is not a problem as they based it on 1.73 million commits from over 50k contributors, the problem is they "trained" their AI model on 70 commits which were evaluated by 10 people answering 7 questions and from that 10 people only 3 were active developers.

[@crusaderanimation6967]

@proosee touche

[@ncubica]

i just keeping seeing in many companies over and over, 20% of the issues are with actual code, 20% with bad hiring, and 60% with human communication and understanding what they are building. It is easier to try to blame the developers but to me the problem with productivity is somewhere else.

[@TheLolz404]

It is the people managing the projects. Because they can't / don't. Too many fads or not enough conviction to the core product.

[@jasontang6725]

What's more likely: A university study that relied on AI generated data produced accurate insights into workplace dynamics, OR a university study that relied on AI generated data produced exactly the type of AI slop that algorithmic media bots love to promote?

[@Randarrradara]

Stanford is just a name, that still holds some prestige, despite the fact that they put out slop most of the time.

[@lowlink534]

I feel like most academia is on that stage where they are just burning down the resources they still have to keep the parasites in it alive for as long as possible, and that may include even big, prestige unis. There's no reason for knowledge to be gatekept lile that anymore, nowadays you can chat for AI for a few hours and get all the knowledge for which would need to attend a class for a whole semester, putting up with boring teachers and burning real resources like your precious time and money. What scares me is that so far most AIs are free to use for the most part, but they might start replacing significant part of our information providers (like websites going down because AI has the content in it) and then we suddenly have to pay these few conglomerates for basic information on a daily basis

[@proosee]

I glanced over this paper and TBH I was embarassed to even read such bs, the quality of this research is terrible, I find it surprising that Stanford even put their university's name behind this paper.

[@etodemerzel2627]

It's not a university study. Stanford had nothing to do with that "research".

[@jackMeought-fr8vl]

The last 10 years have proved pretty well that nobody competent is left in the university system

[@javabeanz8549]

Too bad that most of the work of developers is in thinking, which means that it can't be measured by some keyboard and mouse tracking garbage. AI can't sort out the value of a developer by looking at commits.

[@MushookieMan]

Please wear this brainwave measuring headset thank you

[@javabeanz8549]

@@MushookieMan "we have a chip for that" - NeuralLink

[@justsomenamelesssoul8097]

​@@MushookieManI have anomal brain waves after my brain surgery, now what? 😂

[@bozydargroch9779]

@@justsomenamelesssoul8097 who cares, machine told us to fire you lol

[@mr.xharlie]

Take all these statistics being thrown around with a grain of salt. Cause I'm supposed to believe that the people who stand to make the most money (hint it's not the developers) from cost cutting won't put out what are essentially hit pieces to justify them cutting jobs due their own overspending? Also to add, it comes off as very disingenuous when people take articles headlines and run with them. I'd say whenever you see something that sounds outrageous, read the article and see if it makes sense. 9 times out of 10 it doesn't. But a click bait headline gets clicks

[@lowlink534]

They just want excuses to fire people, maybe this will be a good thing for their business, but in general they just end up hiring even worse people or just going broke for not being able to keep up with the market, I don't care really

[@obsidianjane4413]

Be sure to collect that grain of salt as you are shown the door. BS is very real when its been dropped in your lap. etc.

[@proosee]

Exactly, it always amaze me how much effort there is in seeking improvements in developers job while a the same time there is so much useless management bs.

[@defetya]

​@@prooseei mean it might be

[@Mystic998]

This is what happened with remote work.

[@weirdbuggames]

logging inactive mouse movements and keystrokes and flagging it as idle is probably the dumbest thing to ever be implemented especially for programmers, how could the ai possibly know im just staring at my screen for an hour tryna mentally piece together the piece of code in my head?

[@robinspanier7017]

in my big corp company the programmers have admin rights on their pc and they happen to work in the field of .. programming computers (who would have thought lol) there is no way in hell that the system wouldt detect fraud. the fraudsters would find or create a solution in a few hours while the honest guys that have nothing to hide are not caring. such a system would flag the valueable asset as bad and the bad egg as good.. gg

[@ingae]

Many people are solving the problems using paper and pen. Not much mouse movement or keystrokes but lots of work done.

[@experimentalcyborg]

having worked in many different office environments i can tell you with high confidence that software engineers are some of the most hardworking white collar employees there are. most other positions i've interacted with spent 50% - 75% scrolling, yapping, playing browser games, or pretending do be attending to important business away from their desk while hiding out somewhere else. Office jobs are a scam in general. I am 100% convinced we could condense the 5 day work week into 1 or 2 days of actual work and see zero difference in productivity in the long run, assuming there are mechanisms to keep the employees actually working the whole time during their 1 or 2 work days. Don't get me wrong i don't blame the employees, because most work feels pointless, meaningless, and with no end in sight. The only thing keeping us alive is the weekend. Literally. If a 7 day work week would be instated most office buildings would need nets and window locks.

[@Mylordkaz]

so much agree, what a scam and a waste of money...

[@Eddie-p4l]

"Keep them busy busy busy, back on the farm with the other animals" Line from a document discovered in an 2nd hand copier attributed to the first Bilderberg meeting in the 50's. Idea is to stop humanity from realising we are just landless debt peasants owned by the banksters & their minions.

[@ThoanThbel]

having worked at many different office environments across many different tech sectors and company sizes, i can tell you with high confidence that most software engineers are the least hardworking white collar employees there are. for every truly hardworking developer there are easily 5 who are in the weeds or just slacking. there are many many more folks getting CS degrees today due to the salary and not due to love of software development. this results in folks treating it like a job not a career. to everyone in the comments getting defensive, you're not the target. the person who did a commit at 5pm on a Friday that introduced 3 new bugs right before a release (that the 1 hardworking dev ended up fixing on Sat) is the target. note, i'm not saying the research was done correctly (haven't looked at it). i don't think any meaningful results can be gotten without a lot of inside knowledge. this is why the "ghosts" manage to stay under the radar for so long.

[@experimentalcyborg]

@@ThoanThbel "being in the weeds" or just learning new stuff? There's a difference between wasting time going in circles and learning tangential stuff that will be valuable down the line. If your devs are genuinely slacking, you've either done something wrong in the hiring process and/or ran out of genuine tasks for them and/or aren't offering any future perspective to your employees beyond "you're making a paycheck".

[@ThoanThbel]

@@experimentalcyborg I'm talking about developers completely in the weeds, not folks "just learning new stuff". Senior Devs with 5-10 years of experience with no clue how to debug, copypasting what they hope works out of stackoverflow, sometimes not even bothering to try to build it before committing and using the "this is critical it has to go in now" excuse to bypass checks to get it pushed because they're going to a wedding. Yes, many engineering managers are very bad at interviewing and also trying desperately to fill reqs. "He could implement a linked list, guess he knows C++". Seriously, there are a growing number of devs who only majored in CS because it's a high paying job. They don't care about the code. They just want the paycheck. They don't even like computers. Some of them don't even have a computer at home. It's only 5%-10% of the devs, but all it takes is one or two to bring down quality and raise everyone's blood pressure. Cutting them slack by assuming they mean well is how they glide through a job for a couple years and then bounce to another company. I argue against hiring those kinds of folks, but it often falls on deaf ears.

[@Frazerusy]

The paper does not contain any of the 9.5% infos so lovingly mentioned by almost everyone reporting about this paper. Please read it, its not even a reasonably created paper anyways. One of its main points in the discussion is that effort can be measured more accurately when it's already happened than by predicting it. No shit sherlock!

[@genxer1824]

The funny part is where the AI's author assumes ghost engineers won't game the AI the same way they gamed every other system in place. They only have a job because they are successfully gaming the bureaucracy's metrics. And bureaucracies are _way_ less predictable than an AI. One of the ghost engineers is probably going to take a good look at the metrics, record their own behavior when they do actual work, write a program that makes you look like the most productive member of the staff and then sell it to other ghost engineers. They're lazy, not dumb.

[@mvmlego1212]

I agree with your main point, but I think that some 0.1x-developers are dumb, not lazy. Some programmers seriously do not know what they're doing, and I'm one of them. When I've pair-programmed with teammates, I'm shocked by how quickly their mouse moves from place to place, how steadily they type, and by how much less time they spend thinking than I do--even while getting better results. I don't know whether it's due to a sleep disorder, a neurological disorder, boredom, frustration, laziness, or something else, but I simply can't match their productivity or come anywhere close to it.

[@afnankabir2190]

​@@mvmlego1212 spend more time playing and fiddling around with your computer. Flicking on and off buttons and observing the changes they make can help you be more efficient

[@CrazySexyDutchYessss]

@@mvmlego1212 programming well is not easy. But, if you have teammates you can trust to talk to about training, perhaps they are happy to offer some pointers? It can be anything from programming concepts not yet being fully understood to, as you say, other issues such as procrastination (maybe tasks need to be broken down better) or frustration... which you might not want to discuss at work. (low trust approaches are often needed sadly) But the friendlier corners of t'internet may have insights to offer.

[@nw42]

@@mvmlego1212 IME what ultimately matters is quality, which comes down to thoroughly thinking through problems and solutions-however long that takes. That, and knowing what doesn’t need to be done. And supplemental skills, like clear & concise communication. All that stuff is how you save real time and-more importantly-make everyone else’s life easier. The obsession with speed (keyboard shortcuts! window managers! peripherals!) isn’t BAD per se, indulge in it if you want to, but any time you save that way is basically in the noise.

[@liquidsnake6879]

"How long should it take to create a commit like this" the only real answer is, it depends and that throws the entire study off the rails lol

[@THEMATT222]

2:59 the transfer approval message is sooo poetic though, feels like I'm reading a fable

[@AlexandreTrash]

So 90% of developers still do work, unlike 0% of CEO's that only knows how to spend money. WHEN CEO's AUTOMATIZATION?

[@DaveSmith-cp5kj]

CEOs make or break companies. It's not that the role of CEO is useless, it is that there are bad CEOs who are only hired based on seniority or some kind of diversity metric. A good CEO can save a company in bankruptcy, a bad CEO can tank a fortune 500 company.

[@AlexandreTrash]

@@DaveSmith-cp5kj A startup with a bunch of devs thrives without a CEO, a CEO is nothing without its devs. CEOS are optional.

[@DaveSmith-cp5kj]

@@AlexandreTrash Startups without a leader almost always fail in a year. It's one of the most common mistakes you can make because there has to be a singular vision. Look at the video game industry as an example. There are a lot of indie devs, but the indie games that usually make it are single devs or large groups with a single leader, because leadership is important for efficiency and quality control. Headless teams fall into groupthink.

[@AlexandreTrash]

@@DaveSmith-cp5kj Without CEO doesn't mean without a leader, the leader can be a dev like others but have the final world. And do you really think that the reason for all those startups to fail is the lack of a good leader and not lack of money to invest on marketing and structure? Do you really believe that those AAA games got launched because of an enlighted CEO and not hundreds of thousand of dollars invested by those companies?

[@DaveSmith-cp5kj]

@@AlexandreTrash Do you not know what a CEO is? That IS a CEO. lol Unless the company isn't filed as a corporation (which would be dumb since it would open an employee owned startup to personal liability in the case of a lawsuit or bankruptcy which is insanely risky). Startups never fail from a lack of money. A lack of money means a startup never formulates to begin with. In contrast, a well managed startup can begin with zero funding if you have a good CEO as they know the end game and can articulate that vision to investors. No one cold calls in a group chat for a reason. A good CEO knows how to draw in those angel investors to get a fledgling or even company in bankruptcy proceedings to get off the ground.

[@anonyshinki]

I'm a ghost developer and thankfully the company is too small and poor to worry about that

[@anonyshinki]

I also built half of the system so I can always say "this will take me a year to implement" and nobody will question me

[@CommanderKappa]

Based

[@emberplate]

My career has been 70% ghost, with a high performance year in the middle where I had the highest billable hours and made a bunch of shit. Who cares honestly, these ghost devs might have hobbies or personal projects

[@smithynoir9980]

I wonder if it would ever occur to these manager and executive types that if people are falling off and their work rate is dropping severely across a significant amount of workers, that the problem isn't the workers but rather the constant treatment of everyone being disposable and actively trying to pay everyone as little as they can get away with?

[@MaybeBlackMesa]

Being a 0.1x Dev has always been my dream

[@lunarlake1]

Reading this paper makes me really think about the research quality of Stanford....

[@danvilela]

Makes me think how the heck all those companies would show their code to stanford for this metric..

[@storage9578]

seems you missed one hilarious story last year: stanford prof for ethics got caught fabricating data for research on honesty

[@storage9578]

Funny headline from last year: stan prof for ethics got caught fabricating data for research on honesty

[@rodrigomartindelcampo9534]

2:05 What a time to be alive where CR7, Linus from LTT and the Mexican President appear in the same frame of humorous coding news video

[@mesiroy1234]

Codeing news? Bro i nver coded in my life i ys more like technology news

[@gabrielnilo6101]

Yeah, fire those devs that AI told you, I am sure that it's not going to backfire. I know a unicorn guy who, when fixing some code he's not familiar with, reads everything and writes it all down in a timeline manner. Even if it takes him an entire day to read and understand everything, he’ll do it. Then, if you ask him anything about the code, even a year later, he can answer it and tell you exactly where to find that specific part.

[@Daijyobanai]

The opposite of that guy are the ones who refuse to document anything, not just comments in code, but anything at all related to the code.

[@zorobabel2024]

It's like always: 10% high performer 20% good 40% average 20% bad 10% ghosts Anything new under the sun?

[@JK-zd3md]

one thing to note is that this study doesn't account for non-commit productive time (maintaining, coordinating between other devs, The Actual Managing Work non-technical managers can't actually do, etc.) Which will make the higher dev roles in projects seem "unproductive" compared to like. junior coders bc. they're spending most of their time herding cats and teaching people to fix their code fun.

[@zorobabel2024]

@@JK-zd3md ye, but nevertheless, from my experience this distribution is still true

[@XDarkGreyX]

Where do I ring the bell

[@TheBlackClockOfTime]

Punching a bunch of keys and moving your mouse a lot does not make you a high performer.

[@zorobabel2024]

@TheBlackClockOfTime definitely, but i didn't mean it like that. This distribution is true even when not looking on the input, but plain value output

[@ukaszjonasiak382]

at the end of a day there's still that one repo which cannot be understood by ai that is written by the coworker that has been there 5 years ago

[@GSFigure]

Remember when AI wasn't constantly being pushed into our lives 24/7? Those were the days.

[@MartinWoad]

The problem with Ghost Engineers is that some of them would actually want to do meaningful work, but are denied the opportunity, and they are afraid to change jobs. So instead they use the opportunity to do nothing.

[@pedrogorilla483]

Hi Martin, please check in with HR tomorrow first thing in the morning.

[@LennyMiller739]

​@@pedrogorilla483Which one?

[@dessertlocust]

excuses excuses

[@lowlink534]

No idea man, if a company pays you to do nothing, then maybe they have a bit too much money on their pockets and you're just doing your part in better distributing the resources in our planet 😂🎉

[@proosee]

"Your Honor, I really didn’t mean to steal that car, but it was just so conveniently unlocked."

[@aljavier357]

As a dev, I also do a lot of waiting for emails to arrive and reports to check. Not to mention a whole lot of just talking with team members. "Productivity" cannot be directly measured with code and git commits.

[@goeland4585]

"waiting for emails to arrive and reports to check [...] a lot of talking", are you sure you're not secretly a scrum master or something? >:)

[@thedevlebowski]

Spend a lot of time waiting for my team to catch up. PRs take an enternity to merge at my company.

[@davidnzube7309]

Ghost engineers are often talented individuals who find themselves in positions that don’t fully make use of their skills. They might feel hesitant to take the leap to improve their circumstances.

[@ll01dm]

Why are you calling me out for?🤣

[@SyvexDilecta]

my average work as a dev is to either write simple code and apps in a day and upload it over the span of a week or two, or when i have any issue to solve, i read into it until i understood it, then go afk. at some point the solution will be revealed to me in a dream... or in the shower, on the toilet... anywhere except the pc. then i go back, code it down and bill the customer for the last 16h thinking time i spent

[@Mijdax]

The only downtimes I have at work are due to managers not knowing what they want :D

[@Soggy__302]

Yo the response from that AI has me dying, it basically said: "Ooooo what a twist, okay!"

[@dogukan463]

I think it is easy to become a ghost mainly because I feel most people don’t really need to work. There is not enough work as there are people working. So people make shit up to have some work to do. Which does not seem to have worked.

[@Justinify]

AI tracking everything we do at work feels unsettling. It’s not going to stay confined to engineering or developer roles, I imagine it will touch every role, at every company. The end goal seems to be squeezing as much productivity as possible out of every employee. But we’re human. We work hard, but we also have moments where we might check KZbin or take mental breaks. Now imagine a future where managers aren’t even human anymore, just AI programs tracking every keystroke, pointing out every weakness, and rating our performance solely based on metrics. It’s a strange and concerning direction. Are we really optimizing productivity, or are we just turning people into robots? Maybe the robots are soon to take over at this rate.

[@Likemea]

ai

[@meathotgrillsnearyou]

If 9.5% of the workforce is failing to contribute meaningfully to projects, that strikes me as a failure of leadership and project management. If after all the time and effort that goes into Agile and Scrum and Jira and that ilk, a tenth of your workforce is still getting by doing nothing, then there *should* be mass layoffs... of managers who are more concerned with t-shirt sizes than deliverables..

[@GameWorldEngineer]

there's a lot of projects that have no real work being done for months while they discuss the requirements and do agile scrums that actually deliver nothing meaningful. a lot of waste is going on in the corporate world. seems like the bigger the company, the more wasteful it is. they have so many processes and meetings that nothing actually gets done

[@meathotgrillsnearyou]

@GameWorldEngineer Yup, I'm familiar with having my projects sit in limbo, trying to make myself look busy while the C-suite takes a fiscal quarter to evaluate if my team is strategically aligned with the organization's mission statement.

[@thevenom3125]

0:52 Andrew Rousso mentioned???

[@zeluciojr]

Hell yeah

[@DarthJarJar10]

Because he's a legend amongst legends

[@noxfortes]

I love it when you unexpectedly see a known KZbinr in another one's video kinda like a cameo 😅♥️

[@ryangoslingsspirit07]

Hell Yeah

[@Sajgoniarz]

When our client shutdown my last project i haven't made a single commit in 3 months. Other devs were fixing bugs, while i was spewing more documentation that i wrote in my entire career.

[@aminebenkhouya7295]

wait could you please see how productive are managers, HR, sales, C executives, and all the others, I just feel that software engineers are always over looked down upon, we want across fields position productivity check.

[@iamcarlosamaya]

It’s crazy companies used so many crazy methods to track productivity, when they could just have better management and work towards reaching organizational outcomes.

[@xanderplayz3446]

4:42 WHAT THE HELL I WAS JUST REVERSE ENGINEERING IT

[@mr.hooman4438]

Did you get in?

[@LeetStack]

Man, I have never seen such hate for a career choice: you have the haters who are already in, you have the haters who try to dissuade you, and then on top of that you have to deal with those who hate that they can't do what you do including your boss. The best thing to do is freelance or build your own company if you are good at coding.

[@heckubus4]

As a non-ghost software engineer... I just want a job.

[@Felix-att]

and I, an internship 😢

[@deniskremenetsky1370]

I'm with you bros

[@JonathanRose24]

What ever the actual percentage of engineers that are truly ghost engineers, is the same as literally every other role. This is a sign of bad management, not of bad soft engineers.

[@MrBenBenMushi]

So a research paper where the result comes from IA. What a joke

[@whoeverofhowevermany]

Ah, the point where it becomes clear that the jobs are really more about forcing you to do something than they are about getting work completed.

[@NarutoUA]

5:05 "Secured by Clerk" but still displays full phone number

[@Obie.]

It’s a fake phone number?

[@jeffreytgilbert]

The phone number isn’t a password bud

[@TylerTheDestroyer]

​@@jeffreytgilbert first step to clone a sim is to know the number. Otp go to that number. It's as good as a password

[@TylerTheDestroyer]

​​@@Obie.Provide evidence? So you admit that Clerk allows fake numbers. Real secure

[@DutchGuy4068]

​@@TylerTheDestroyer A fake phone number for MFA is about as secure as is gets.. Literally, nobody will be able to log in. 😅

[@WhyWouldYouDrawThat]

This is one of your best videos imho. You have developed your own style 100%. I can’t get enough of your dark, subtle, sarcastic, and funny commentary.

[@Epinardscaramel]

0:32 I sure hope that reddit post was a troll, even the first part is troubling

[@tanuki460]

Can’t wait until researchers found out that most of the job doesn’t give much value to the society either.

[@RawPeds]

3:20 sauce?

[@skylinefx049]

sauce?

[@bigchungus-vz5fg]

it's under the cheese

[@tuxlu1761]

" The ultimate dev political compass" on r/programmerhumor

[@FionavanDahl]

it's the Stanford study linked in the description, Table 7

[@Joshua-fr9fi]

The movie is Office Space

[@justinian420]

I wonder if that 9.5% who do almost no work are mostly people who in the study snapshot, did no work for reasons of labor hoarding. In my career, I will go like 18 months working all out, then 3 months where there is nothing to do and the bosses basically don't say anything and we don't say anything and eventually there's another titanic project

[@ulamgexe7442]

Sounds like managers are getting replaced by AI before devs eh

[@Brynjar1]

Companies when you don't spill 1000 lines per minute:

[@rmt3589]

I really like the idea of Microsoft Recall, EXCEPT that Microsoft can control it. Microsoft controlling it makes it FAR WORSE than not having it. I would like to make my own version for myself. But I don't want an overseer, or anyone else really, to have access.

[@leochootech]

3:56 Remote workers MUST be more productiv because getting things done is the only way to prove that they've been working. In the office, you can pretend to work at get away. But again, this assumes a reasonable management. If the management is shit, you will bring down the dev productivity with you.

[@FakhriMrabet]

The rarest thing that ever happened to me this month, witnessing fireship video 30 seconds upon upload, yet somehow 30 person already commented on it x-x

[@LeoPerkk]

This is the opposite of "bro fell off"

[@ShaahzaadKaleem]

Thats AI

[@MatheusLB2009]

They are all AI comments

[@valentinrafael9201]

To be fair, that is actually very reasonable nowadays because you can use Keywords, a browser extension, click on a video and it takes in automagically the auto generated transcript ( or the transcript posted by the youtuber ) and you can have the video summarized by claude / gpt / geminie with one click

[@nw42]

@@MatheusLB2009 Almost all the comments I’ve seen are pretty insightful, and I’m not surprised. The “study” is horribly flawed, it will almost certainly be used to fuel more layoffs, and Fireship is a day late to the party-people have already been passionately discussing it in depth.

[@yp5387]

9.5% programmers knows thay best program is no program. No program, no bugs thus no system outages and no customer complaints.

[@zeroskill.]

i know its from stanford but im not sure how accurate this report is based on what ive heard about it

[@ShaferHart]

who gives money to Stanford? People who want workers back in the office and they're way more productive in the office, right, Stanford?

[@jantube358]

I'm a fan of making social media 16+. I was always saying TikTok should be 18+. There are two fallacies starting at 2:18 1) You don't need to proof that the person is really 18+. Porn sites are 18+ too and there is no real proof. TikTok is 12+ in my app store and 12 years is way too young for apps like TikTok. 2) Even if you want to proof that someone is 18+ like you do when registering SIM cards you don't need any digital ID. Here, you buy SIM cards either online and register them somewhere like a post office or you buy SIM cards in a local shop and you show your paper ID in the local shop. Same with 18+ video games and movies.

[@dansplain2393]

0:48 please, it’s just the tip

[@evrenerce]

I remember days that our team was writing and committing unimportant additions to the project solely to appear as productively working, because actually important parts of the work would take too complicated and would take long time to finish at the moment, perhaps there is no way to measure if a developer is ghost or not, as well as productive or not, because of reason like this.

[@c3h4ohcooh3]

One cause of ghost devs/employees is management that doesn't care. They don't know what you do, don't want to learn how to manage it, and don't care about the cost. If you care about doing a good job for your company, then it sucks. If you only care about the paycheck, then it's probably great.

[@greateagle8799]

At my work, with IT helpdesk, 80 percent are 'ghosts'

[@ASTH-yf9uu]

😂😂 please replace my 0.1x manager

[@kokkor-s6w]

There is something not many people talk about which is the fact that some jobs in big companies are essentially ghost jobs because you don't really do much work. I have my engineers which have barely written any code all successfully retaining their job. This happens because of the massive hierarchy and projects running at one time and often it happens that some projects are not very well-managed. In fact some projects are completely useless.

[@obiomajronyekwere4469]

Damn now i actually have to do some work.

[@weeb3277]

please don't

[@anywallsocket]

Let’s not forget a lot of employees do little of substance because a lot of companies do little of substance - many people I know start projects only for their bosses to abandon them, or just to reconfigure the same business model to include all the new and trending buzz words. It’s all hot air, always has been.

[@neelmehta9092]

How can you distinguish between 0x and 10x? I know people that solve quantum physics is 10 seconds and then wait all day to publish their findings

[@valentinrafael9201]

It doesn't matter how you can distinguish, really. It only matters that they think they can distinguish, and that's dangerous.

[@stunlord]

9.5%??? hahahahha. yeah, more than 10% of ALL professions don't do a lick of work. every job I've ever had, had more than 10% of employees doing next to nothing or literally nothing. not counting management, where it's closer to 90%

[@djenntt]

I worked with a ghost dev once, he made my job harder and he was a "senior".

[@australianman8566]

same

[@proosee]

Yeah, we all know those exist, but still, basing productivity on number of commits is insanely stupid.

[@djenntt]

@@proosee I’m pretty sure we can spot the 10% easily. Just catch them playing Halo Infinite like I accidentally did with my senior dev.

[@proosee]

@@djenntt sure, I've seen few myself, but it doesn't mean that now this study is suddenly legit.

[@djenntt]

@@proosee I think you think I disagree with you so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make 😅

[@AuroralightYT]

working at a medium sized family company that is still very far behind software and tech in general, we are still trying to get people to use Jira. I think im safe from this lol

[@DavidTector]

Only 9.5 percent?! Yeah right...

[@_y7ya]

They really need to distinguish between product companies and service companies. Product companies is where an engineer can get a way by doing nothing since there’s no client to pressure the company on progress. However, for positions such as in software agencies where we are held directly accountable for delivering our services - this ghost engineer phenomenon is almost non existant.

[@cleroth]

These people never heard of the Pareto principle? Why is this a surprise? 10% of the workforce doesn't do shit, IT or not.

[@crackwitz]

It's 80/20. 20% do 80% of the work, 80% do 20% of the work. And that covers the useless ones.

[@rockyx588]

That 10% are managers that use meetings to justify their salary.

[@andresmartinezramos7513]

I have only ever seen the Pareto principle to back up anecdotes and not proof of anything substantial about what it underlines besides that some distributions are power laws. It is the equivalent of saying: I earn more than you because of the Gauss distribution

[@tehArgento]

I can imagine somewhere an HR team based on the title of the research they are going to fire 9% of their team XD

[@benjiunofficial]

G..ghost engineer? I don't like this, Scoob

[@benji5597]

Can't wait to replace my manager and my boss with AI

[@Neuvalence]

so where do i sign up to become a ghost?

[@youarethecssformyhtml]

Yes

[@TheLaiKash]

This is the perfect example of "we start a study aiming for a result". No clear explanation or hypothesis thrown outside of "youre a ghost haha". Sensationalism. Developers and engineers are not the same. You dont measure how efficient is a industrial engineer from the number of mathematical operations it makes. Same as lines of code. Not everyone is an engineer. Not every engineer is a developer. Not every developer is a computer science/software engineer

[@vectoralphaSec]

Being a software developer/ software engineer is just gonna be worse and worse with time.

[@danvilela]

keep that pessimistic mindset out of here simp

[@beterax]

My notification was: Fireship uploaded: dystopian AI slop wants busty ghost engineers... 😳

[@cpu-qp8ez]

1:45 that's not what glowie means

[@yanniammari1491]

The feds and Cia's dream litterally what terry meant by glowing n******

[@Reeg3x]

You don’t know what you’re talking about, fed.

[@cpu-qp8ez]

@Reeg3x go ahead and enlighten me by explaining how it made sense in the context that Fireship used it

[@yanniammari1491]

@cpu-qp8ez copilot monitors everything on your screen and is a non options the feds and 3 lettter agencies love that shit so itd their wet dream aka the glowie's wet dream

[@perthecther__203]

All these cia glow in the dark

[@ray.gene.bowner]

Larry Wheels the kind of guy who uses a 45lb weight plate as a mouse

[@user-dd3lw2pq9v]

Is fireship a corporate shill now?

[@TorpedoBench]

The matter of if it's a good idea or not aside, If I'm not mistaken, Australia's new social media ban law has an explicit provision that platforms are not allowed to require government IDs to verify age. Presumably that's to prevent those companies from just mass-gathering IDs, which is nice.

[@OfficialGreatTelevision]

They're's something strange... in the computer lab!

[@АртемФедоров-ю7б]

Software engineering is not only writing code, you can't measure it. I don't write code a lot but I solve problems, even few lines of code can fix a major bug and bring a lot of value to the project. Not sure if measuring lines of code written or git commit history will help

[@xiaoshen194]

Most of these "people" making 6-7 figures are women with 0 figure...

[@tomascanevaro4292]

What an ignorant bigoted comment

[@gtleshow]

Classic Stanford move: publish a study that leaves us with more questions than answers!