Yegor Denisov-Blanch, who is a Stanford researcher doing research on software engineering productivity, shared some interesting data on X. Using data from more than 50,000 engineers from hundreds of companies, his team has determined that
9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing.
There is some debate in the thread on whether the information is valid, but it's certainly an interesting possibility to consider.
Near the end of the thread, Yegor asserts:
"This unfairly burdens teams, wastes company resources, blocks jobs for others, and limits humanity’s progress."
There's definitely something to consider in the findings, but as some point out in the discussion, it's a possibility that these so-called 'ghost engineers' are being flagged as such incorrectly (i.e. they're false negatives). We'll have to see if there is further research on this, and Yegor does link to
his website where you can help by participating in the research.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
