Is code an asset or a liability?
Code is an asset, but each line is a liability. Let’s explain.
About 10% of developers ‘do virtually nothing’
Stanford research in developer productivity has identified 0.1x engineers.
A Stanford study examining software engineering productivity, conducted on over 50,000 software engineers across hundreds of companies, has found that around 9.5% of engineers contribute minimal work.
Ghost engineers, as the research named them, receive full salaries and cost companies billions each year. To draw a comparison with 10x engineers, they’re called 0.1 engineers because their output equals 0.1 median engineer’s work.
The research indicated that this issue is particularly widespread in remote work environments, where 14% of engineers were identified as “ghost engineers,” compared to just 6% among office-based employees. Productivity was assessed by analyzing private Git repositories and through simulated expert evaluations of code commits.
Less than 3 commits/month
While the study’s author admits that code commits are a flawed way to measure productivity, they do reveal inactivity. So, what do ghost engineers do to fake working? Data says 58% of them make less than 3 commits/month, and 42% make trivial changes like changing one character or line of code.
Engineers who do not work not only cost companies billions of dollars a year, but they also waste companies’ resources, block their colleagues, waste their time and slow them down, and burden their teams overall.
