As many as one in 10 coders are 'ghost engineers,' Stanford researcher says, lurking online and doing no work
Tough luck. The latest catchphrase to describe working less is "ghost engineer" — and it comes not from burnt-out employees but from a Stanford researcher whose team has developed an algorithm to help tech companies identify freeloading coders.
The Stanford researcher and former Olympic-level weightlifter Yegor Denisov-Blanch ran the algorithm, which grades the quality and quantity of employees' code repositories on GitHub, on the work of more than 50,000 employees across hundreds of companies.
Denisov-Blanch calls these workers "ghost engineers," defined as software engineers who are only 10% as productive or less than their median colleague.
His research began as an attempt to find a better way to grade the performance of software engineers, he said in an interview with Business Insider.
"Software engineering is a black box," Denisov-Blanch said. "Nobody knows how to measure software engineers' performance. Existing measures are unreliable because they rate equal work differently."
