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I’ve seen this claim recently and it’s rubbish.
Yes, if by “nothing” we mean writing next to no code, because they’re busy either:
- architecting software solutions, as they’re knowledgeable enough that they should be doing this instead of writing code
- understanding a lot of what is going on in components and/or the system so that when there’s an issue they say “oh, this is likely because of X” and the resolution takes days instead of weeks.
I.e. yes, there is a percentage of developers who we pile other tasks on and they don’t get to write code.
My experience is that the more knowledgeable developers get, the less code they write.
Then neurodivergent peeps are different - an Autistic dev might be super knowledgeable and happy writing unit tests because they don’t enjoy the uncertainty of large problems, or an ADHD developer might have a large system-wide view but write what seem like small contributions.
Or have incessant meetings with Senior management or Business Unit leadership to keep them in the loop or even constrain their unrealistic expectations.
Yeah… How many “ghost devs” don’t produce much code because they area stuck in meeting after meeting that they don’t need to be in just in case “someone has a tech question”?
We recently got moved under someone who leads call center operations and they’re wanting to apply similar metrics to the devs to “ensure they’re being productive the entire time”. I told them that there’s lots of work they do outside the normal 9-5 and that you can’t just measure what someone does by lines of code created else you’ll end up with a 30 line if statement instead of a for each letter loop, but they don’t seem to care. If things get implemented I’m just waiting for the shit show it’ll cause.
Yup. I judge devs by problems solved (bugs fixed, features implemented) based on initial estimate and actual delivery time. If they’re consistently off, they either need help with estimation (I’ll tell them to increase estimates) or they aren’t doing their job. I don’t care if the solution is 1 lines or 1000 lines (well, I prefer less code), I care if they feel confident in their estimate before starting work, and if they’re able to deliver close to their estimate. I also care what others on the team think about their estimate, and I’ll review anything that seems out of whack.
And this is why I refuse to work anywhere where the people managing devs don’t have dev experience. My boss was a dev, and they’re fantastic at catching me on my BS, which tells me I’m being fairly evaluated. I can’t ask for more than that.
You’re talking about people who work at a high level and might not type that much code. Thats definitely a thing.
I’ve also got a junior front line engineer on my team who does literally nothing. It takes them 10x too long to do anything and they require so much help from seniors than it would be faster for them to do it themselves. One of the seniors told me “a sure fire way to make sure something doesn’t get done is to give it to them.”
But gosh, it isn’t 10% of them that are like this. No way. This person is 1 in 500.
I am number 2.
Well, you are what you eat, and so is your poo.
Crack a window, buddy.
It’s possible to have a developer that does nothing. But that’ll requires a project manager that does nothing and a manager that does nothing. And coworkers that are willing to put up with that shit. Everybody’s running kanban or agile simply to keep this from happening.
In my experience, kanban and agile might technically prevent an employee from doing nothing, but they also might very well facilitate someone doing nothing productive.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-haymaker-you-if-you-mention-agile-again/
It happens, but it always comes to light eventually. People are too busy keeping up with their own work to be babysitting someone who doesn’t want to put in the effort.
Some people do nothing but kanban and agile which is effectively doing nothing.
If you are properly using either of those it’s very easy to tell if someone’s not pulling their weight or is having extreme difficulty in a situation.
As soon as someone starts underperforming in project management constructs, you put more eyes on the task. They’re either a legitimately stuck, or they’re not working.
They’re just tools, and they make it very easy to visualize what’s going on.
Exactly.
We use both, and the only people who spend significant amounts of time interacting with the board are project managers (during sync meetings across teams), scrum masters (planning and following up), and product owners (creating requirements). Devs spend a little time adding their own estimates, comments, or moving things along the kanban board, but that’s not a lot of time, and that goes for me as a lead as well.
We have 7 or 8 dev teams, three project managers (one per region), and two scrum masters (at HQ, not sure how our outside teams handle it). And honestly, I think our two scrum masters are a little redundant because there’s only so much agile that needs to be done.
If a dev (regardless of seniority) is spending more than half a day in a given week on kanban stuff, they’re probably avoiding doing their job.
Has an MBA ever contributed anything of value?
It’s just really sad to see this comment and also upvoted this many times. Doesn’t contribute to the conversation at all, plus possibly starts some hate circlejerk.
That rate seems high. But, I have done post-mortems on a bad developer’s run at a company, and found they did very nearly nothing. No commits, no issues opened or closed, some comments, but that was almost their entire digital footprint.
Most developers I’ve worked with are obviously not doing nothing, though some of us (including myself) get stuck doing a lot of work on a project that never makes it into production due to shifting priorities.
Yup. I’m a senior software dev, and some weeks I write no code at all. Sometimes that’s because I’m researching something (output is a doc a/ estimates), other times it’s code reviews, and other times I’m stuck in meetings all week.
But most weeks I’ll write some code, even if it’s just fixing some tech debt. If someone isn’t contributing for a month, they’re definitely not doing their job.
Tldr the original article is all based off the findings of AI trying to evaluate the efficiency of code contributions. And from the little i looked at it, it seems to fall apart pretty quickly after that.
It’s really astonishing how an entire article written using an AI-based metric is taken seriously, let alone discussed at length. Well, it probably plays into existing biases, which is likely the reason for its existence in the first place.
There is a difference between productivity and activity, you can be 100% active at work all day, yet 0% productive. Imagine you work on a project for 6 months and then the manager decide to drop the project. You have been unproductive for 6 months, doesn’t mean you were slacking off, but in the end when we calculate the productivity of developers, it is lower because of this.
Sometimes I feel like I do nothing.
My productivity is pretty low since I got promoted to one of our “lead developers.” So much of my time is spent looking at other people’s code, answering questions, mentoring, etc. Task switching becomes a huge issue, where even if I have time I’ve been pulled back and forth and it takes me like an hour to get back into whatever I was doing. It can take weeks for me to close tickets sometimes. And sometimes even when I have busy days, I come away feeling like I did nothing.
It’s definitely giving me Peter Principle vibes sometimes. And though my manager always tells me I’m doing good work, I feel like he’s too disconnected from my day-to-day, and that surely my Scrum Master and Product Owner are trying to get me replaced.
It’s…not a great state of mind, even if I know it’s bullshit. They wouldn’t be giving me raises if they didn’t think I was worth it. But…still. I’ve never stayed at the same job this long, and part of me keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Imposter syndrome is a bitch.
I’m in the same exact boat, but would like to offer you this:
obligatory Betteridge’s law of headlines
As a previous so-called ‘ghost engineer’, it took three people to replace me, and four months for damage control when I wasn’t there to keep things in top shape. There was documentation to keep things running, but since I wrote that documentation and “my contributions weren’t necessary foe the team’s success” Well. Why leave them?
No, but I want to be one.
I’m one of those who “do nothing”, if you’re measuring by commits and lines of code.
- as an architect, I spend way too much time doing diagrams and presentation
- as a point of engineering escalation, I spend a lot of time researching things no one can figure out
- as a stickler for code quality, I like nothing more than those days where my lines of code are negative
On the other hand, if you go by the amount of code I indirectly effect with best practices, code quality, appsec, and assisting developers, I affect all of engineering (hundreds)
Yet more bullshit probably aimed at RTO. Corporate media will keep pushing the same narrative.
Yeah her comment that basically saying bullshit like this almost SOLEY to justify layoffs is pretty deprived is right on the money
If someone really does nothing, it’s really obvious. You don’t need statistical analysis to determine who it is, just ask their teammates. Developers don’t work in isolation. Actually, it’s a very collaborative job where you’re in constant interaction with other people. If someone doesn’t contribute their fair share, it’s going to be obvious very quickly.
The problem is often a lack of mechanism to act on it. Sure everyone might complain about a coworker, but once a person is hired they become just a number and management doesn’t typically care about individual performance, only that all the spots in the org chart are filled.
This is actually a pretty good analysis. I love that she clarifies it’s not a research paper, but a “canva infographic.” Spot on.
She doesn’t mention that the MBA professor who authored the infographic also seems to contract with FounderPartners, a VC consulting firm.
So this is really an ad for his side gig; “Pay us lots of money, and we’ll justify your layoffs with sciency mumbo jumbo.🌈😘📈”
I didn’t watch this yet, but the title matches with the article this company published how their LLM model discovered this, but they (the authors) don’t even fully understand how this was calculated. Basically, using AI for AI’s sake.
Edit. Found it.
Edit 2. Here’s the original Lemmy post, if you’re interested. (I don’t know how to bang-link a Lemmy post…)
She found the original, properly written article that has a healthy discussion about quality of commits, and had no mention of productivity
