[HN Gopher] Ghost Engineers and Proof or a Lack Thereof
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Ghost Engineers and Proof or a Lack Thereof
Author : CarefreeCrayon
Score : 15 points
Date : 2024-12-09 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nishtahir.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nishtahir.com)
| wavemode wrote:
| I feel two things simultaneously reading this.
|
| On one hand, the original study seems faulty, on its face (a
| human who isn't involved in a project can't possibly accurately
| assess how much actual effort went into a particular commit -
| much less, an AI model.) And the media's interpretation of the
| results (10% of engineers do nothing all day) is obviously
| laughable.
|
| On the other hand, despite the premise and interpretation being
| laughable... I feel like the conclusion kind of isn't. We know
| from our own experiences that many engineers at large companies
| are not producing much value with their time. 10% is an
| underestimate. And it's a problem I reflect on quite a lot.
|
| But the reasons are a lot more complex than, they log in to work
| everyday and then go take a nap. No, rather most of the time an
| engineer is not producing much value because she is not being
| asked to produce much value, she's just being asked to look busy.
| In other words it's an organizational problem.
|
| Per Parkinson's Law, you can take any engineering task previously
| done by an individual and expand it into work for an entire team.
| (Take that API and turn it into a service, take that service and
| make it into a bunch of microservices, take those microservices
| and deploy them on Kubernetes, take that Kubernetes cluster and
| automate its maintenance and deployments and upgrades, and now
| take those maintenance processes and wrap them in an internal
| service...) And at every step of the way, you can easily justify
| to your boss, and your boss's boss, that the work is important.
| And some of it is! But it's a difficult job figuring out where to
| draw the line exactly, and most leaders have no incentive to do
| so (bigger org = bigger paycheck).
| ludston wrote:
| Even if it is true that a percentage of engineers essentially
| do nothing at all, I would expect that an even bigger
| percentage of engineers are building things that do not have a
| market on account of bizarre decisions from leadership.
| mateo411 wrote:
| This is true too.
|
| However, many times Engineering teams are asked to build
| something that is speculative. Leadership and the Product
| team thinks they are building something that could make money
| in the future and justify the investment.
|
| Other times folks are building something which is directly
| attributable to existing customers revenue. It may be that it
| won't bring in any additional revenue, but it will reduce
| OPEX and improve the margins of the business.
|
| It's a good idea to understand which type of project they are
| working on from the business perspective.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| It's disheartening that what is essentially a fully synthetic
| study (using the opinions of 10 people that mostly aren't
| programmers to train a model that only examines literal commit
| activity and then come to a conclusion that many thousands of
| people do nothing at work all day and can be safely laid off) can
| be used to grab headlines in this way.
|
| PR firms all over the world are taking very detailed notes about
| this, since it's a template to push essentially any narrative
| they want about anything but with the veneer of it being a
| "study" and therefore in some sense scientific and rational. This
| will only further tarnish the brand of science and rationality.
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