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There is a difference between productivity and activity, you can be 100% active at work all day, yet 0% productive. Imagine you work on a project for 6 months and then the manager decide to drop the project. You have been unproductive for 6 months, doesn’t mean you were slacking off, but in the end when we calculate the productivity of developers, it is lower because of this.
Tldr the original article is all based off the findings of AI trying to evaluate the efficiency of code contributions. And from the little i looked at it, it seems to fall apart pretty quickly after that.
It’s really astonishing how an entire article written using an AI-based metric is taken seriously, let alone discussed at length. Well, it probably plays into existing biases, which is likely the reason for its existence in the first place.
Sometimes I feel like I do nothing.
My productivity is pretty low since I got promoted to one of our “lead developers.” So much of my time is spent looking at other people’s code, answering questions, mentoring, etc. Task switching becomes a huge issue, where even if I have time I’ve been pulled back and forth and it takes me like an hour to get back into whatever I was doing. It can take weeks for me to close tickets sometimes. And sometimes even when I have busy days, I come away feeling like I did nothing.
It’s definitely giving me Peter Principle vibes sometimes. And though my manager always tells me I’m doing good work, I feel like he’s too disconnected from my day-to-day, and that surely my Scrum Master and Product Owner are trying to get me replaced.
It’s…not a great state of mind, even if I know it’s bullshit. They wouldn’t be giving me raises if they didn’t think I was worth it. But…still. I’ve never stayed at the same job this long, and part of me keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Imposter syndrome is a bitch.
As a previous so-called ‘ghost engineer’, it took three people to replace me, and four months for damage control when I wasn’t there to keep things in top shape. There was documentation to keep things running, but since I wrote that documentation and “my contributions weren’t necessary foe the team’s success” Well. Why leave them?
I’m one of those who “do nothing”, if you’re measuring by commits and lines of code.
- as an architect, I spend way too much time doing diagrams and presentation
- as a point of engineering escalation, I spend a lot of time researching things no one can figure out
- as a stickler for code quality, I like nothing more than those days where my lines of code are negative
On the other hand, if you go by the amount of code I indirectly effect with best practices, code quality, appsec, and assisting developers, I affect all of engineering (hundreds)
And that’s obvious from the very beginning, when you look at how human collectives work. You never can determine who really does nothing.
Even if we imagine this is somehow possible, there are social predators, as in psychopaths or at least scheming jerks, in every one of them, who don’t want a transparent structure of responsibility. And there’s the majority of us who rely on their kind to handle the social dynamics we don’t want. And there’s need for some stability.
But all that aside, engineers would be the last group in my list to check for people “doing nothing”. Almost everyone eager to discuss engineers “doing nothing” would fit higher there.
No, but I want to be one.
If I had to put money one which an MBA or a software engineer doing jack shit at work. I’d lean pretty heavily towards the MBA.
I’m pretty sure the reason we don’t see the engineer side is because the engineers are focused on problems solving. The other groups are more focused on selling and conveying information. If that’s your job you are going to be much better at shifting attention scrutiny to other groups.
This is actually a pretty good analysis. I love that she clarifies it’s not a research paper, but a “canva infographic.” Spot on.
She doesn’t mention that the MBA professor who authored the infographic also seems to contract with FounderPartners, a VC consulting firm.
So this is really an ad for his side gig; “Pay us lots of money, and we’ll justify your layoffs with sciency mumbo jumbo.🌈😘📈”
I’ve seen a couple that have had like one or two trivial commits in the half year it took for them to get laid off. Idk what kind of manager did not solve whatever was going on there. I guess getting laid off is a solution, too.
Not into software developing but…I got a project manager and project lead that basically took over my project under my feet because they thought I was working too slowly. Now they got a junior engineer who thinks he’s inventing all the things I had to invent to solve a problem…like a painter who thinks he’s designed the perfect home. Well they’re finding out now where ideas come from and that its not in the paint can or the brush. I love watching them squirm when their shitty design can’t pass DFMEA so then …do they design something different? Nah! DFMEA’s can’t tell you that your design id dumb as fuck! Its you! You! The engineer has to realize how stupid their design in. Instead, they proceed to apply resources to the ton of action items. Surely the pig will fly if we crush all the bones and reshape him into a parachute! I’ll be right here when you guys are done fooling around and getting monthly praises and recognition. Praises and recognition by the way is the best way to get engineers out of your way…they get promoted to project lead or management! Suddenly they cant invent your inventions anymore!
I believe it, but in a different scenario
Imagine the worker does some work, but it takes ten hours more of other people’s testing to find all the bugs, and ten hours of someone more competent to fix them. Even though he did twenty hours of work, if he never showed up the pace of the work, someone doing it better might not affect others by just being more correct and actually might save others work by organizing the code in a way that is easier to understand.
It is not obvious that people who do a lot of work are actually positively benefiting the overall effort. I’ve certainly had to go and rewrite terrible code before. If it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t need to read it to see if it needed to be rewritten in the first place.
I knew a guy who worked at microsoft and basically did all of his work for the week in a couple of hours and then spent the entire rest of the week playing VR
People do something, but often it’s the wrong thing, and essentially nothing, or worse than nothing
Maybe our company is an odd one out but I’m pretty sure that number is more like 20-30%…
Out of a team of 10, 2 of us do about 50% of the work. 3 do about 30%, and the remaining five do about 20%… With probably two to three of them doing effectively nothing most of the time.
In our team isn’t abnormal.
I will say I worked one job where we had to submit network changes which was supposed to be checked by 5 different network engineers and then implemented.
Those 5 people would take a couple months just to fuck up my requests every gd time.
