The tech industry is rattled by Stanford professor Yegor Denisov-Blanch’s recent assertion that nearly 10% of software engineers are “ghost engineers” who make virtually no contributions to their organizations but are nevertheless paid. If accurate, this figure highlights a huge inefficiency that could cost tech companies millions of dollars.
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What are ‘Ghost Engineers’?
Denisov-Blanch uses the term “ghost engineers” to describe employees who are at least 90% less productive than their average colleagues. In simple terms, they aren’t contributing much to the work at hand, and Denisov-Blanch says that finding and dealing with these ‘ghost engineers’ could save companies billions in unnecessary costs.
The study says it looked at the coding work of over 50,000 engineers from hundreds of companies using an algorithm to measure both the amount of code they wrote and the quality of their work. Even though the study hasn’t been reviewed by other experts yet, its results have already received considerable attention and started discussions about productivity in tech.
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How the Algorithm Works
The research team ran an algorithm over two years, evaluating internal code repositories to measure individual engineers’ productivity. The goal was to assess how much real, valuable work was being done – not just counting the lines of code but evaluating how challenging and maintainable that code was.
Denisov-Blanch said, “It’s not fair when someone’s doing a very complicated change that’s only one line of code. And the person doing the very simple change that’s 1,000 lines gets rewarded,” and explained that sometimes even one line of code can be really complex and incredibly important while writing hundreds of lines might be an easy task. According to him, the algorithm tried to figure out which work was real and valuable compared to work that didn’t matter.
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Controversial Findings
The findings have been controversial. The study suggests that almost 10% of engineers aren’t pulling their weight. These findings feel especially significant in an era of layoffs and increasing pressure in the tech sector. Denisov-Blanch didn't mince words – he argued that these underperforming employees are wasting resources and unfairly burdening their teams.
However, many software engineers have pushed back on these claims, pointing out that measuring productivity through code output alone can be misleading. Writing good code isn’t always about writing a lot of code. Sometimes, the most meaningful work involves refining, debugging or discussing solutions, which are tasks that might not appear clearly in a metrics-based evaluation.
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‘Lazy Techies’ or Misunderstood?
It’s easy to understand why this study upset people. There’s a stereotype that software engineers have easy jobs without doing much real work, and Denisov-Blanch’s claims add to that idea. A lot of the criticism is because the study mostly looks at numbers like code commits – which are easy to count but don’t show everything an engineer does.
This kind of narrative can be dangerous in today's challenging job market, especially within tech. It justifies even more layoffs at a time when many engineers are struggling to find stability.
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