Ghost Engineers
I just watched a really great theo.gg video. He reflects on a recent study (and subsequent articles) about the phenomena of Ghost Engineers. Employees who do 0.1x the work of an average engineer and still get paid the same.
In the latter section of the video he perfectly encapsulated how I feel I have contributed over my time at my Student Union. It feels a bit narcissistic to call myself a 10x worker, but certainly compared to my counterparts and colleagues (even the career staff) I have produced, suggested, and spent time on work more than 'average'.
I've edited a little the transcript section I resonated with most. I never had a good enough manager (or a good manager with enough time and capacity) to affirm and empower me. I never had someone sit me down and either say 'you're doing great work, make sure you pace yourself' or 'you're moving too fast, why not focus on this particular idea and let's make it happen'. Instead I was left churning out ideas, strategies, analysis, solutions, work that either never saw the light of day, was shelved, or was simply neglected in favour of other people's personal priorities or the 'issue of the day'.
I hope you enjoy and learn something :)
Some glossary for non-tech people:
- Commit refers to an action in git. Its like a record of all the changes you've made to a project since the last commit. Think of it as one of those timestamps on google docs.
- PR refers to an action in git. It is like a suggestion or comment on a google doc. It might be a single change, or the result of many hours of parallel work (git is a tool that allows multiple people to work on the same multi-document project at the same time). Usually this symbolises the number of shippable contributions (or fixes made to the project).
Youtube Video
The article he references
it's worth noting that measuring productivity in software engineering is notoriously tricky. commit counts or hours logged are poor indicators of true impact.
this is actually a fun thing I had to explain to one of my contractors a while back because he was doing incredible work and was billing like 8 to 10 hours a week; and I sat him down I was like man you're billing for the time in front of the keyboard aren't you; he's like yeah is that what I'm supposed to do?
it's like how much time do you spend thinking about the things you're going to work on? when you're going out to grab food is part of your brain thinking about the thing you were just working on? yeah absolutely; and after a few of those he realized oh yeah most of my hours are working in some way that's why the 10 hours I spend in front of the keyboard are as productive as they are and I convinced them to stop just billing for time in front of computer and start billing a more General number of hours based on the time his brain was dedicated to the thing that he was doing because he was not a 0.1x engineer he was not a ghost engineer;
if anything he kind of got treated as one in other roles [/jobs] where he built really good things that the team wasn't ready for and they just sat on it and never shipped it; inadvertently turning him into a ghost engineer who built a bunch of work that never came out. it sucks.
yeah somebody in chat said bill by results not by hours; I agree, it's hard though because if you spec out a product and say this will cost this much you will be wrong with your spec sum amount; my rule was always double the number that you think it's going to be and you might be close; the problem then is if somebody doubles their number and tells me and then I double it and tell it to somebody else the estimates get all over the place.
As they say here, commit counts are not reliable. We need better ways to measure productivity so some high performing Engineers, the mythical 10x enges, [who] produce significant results with fewer and well thought out contributions [aren’t left out or fired]. and then there's me who makes the contribution to show how something will work and then a real 10x comes and fixes it. it's funny, I make so many PRs that don't get merged now because they're showing how the thing should be done and then someone else comes in and does it; but yeah these things are hard to measure.
okay the ghost engineer Trend exposes systemic inefficiencies in talent management and performance evaluation; remote work policies once heralded as a game changer are now under the microscope; they've enabled Flexibility for many but have also given rise to the ghost engineering phenomena; the tug of war over remote versus in-office work is likely to intensify as companies grapple with these kinds of leadership and accountability issues;
this was such a good article that I'm going to subscribe my researcher to it so he has to tell me when there's good emails; sorry Gabriel I need someone to keep up with this.
how do you feel? are you a ghost engineer? or are you working with a whole bunch of them? let me know what you think and until next time, fire the useless people