In different phrases, Denisov-Blanch’s rivalry that much less code is a robust indicator of poor efficiency may sign the alternative. As a minimum, it doesn’t verify his and the opposite researchers’ finger-pointing at low ranges of Git commits as dispositive proof of builders “ghosting” their employers. Nor does it verify his “don’t-quote-me-on-this” argument that the analysis additionally reveals that “the highest 25% of engineers contributed about 50% to 60% of the output,” although that discovering could also be extra intuitively right, given the 80/20 rule.)

Much less code might imply extra productiveness

Counting code commits, whereas an comprehensible strategy, is flawed. Sure, the strategy is a little more subtle than that, however not as a lot because the researchers seem to think. For instance, Nvidia Senior Engineering Supervisor Aaron Erickson points out that the researchers may discover “one other 10% of engineers who do add code, but it surely’s ineffective abstractions or vainness rework that provides damaging worth and confusion.” Stanford’s analysis would say that these are beneficial engineers, however in actuality, they is likely to be doing extra hurt than good. Their employers can be higher off in the event that they determined to ghost as a substitute of committing worse-than-useless code. The analysis doesn’t account for unhealthy contributions, by Denisov-Blanch’s admission. They only anticipate unhealthy commits are resolved throughout assessment.

All of it is a good distance of claiming the analysis might not say what the researchers imagine. This wouldn’t be an enormous deal besides that the headline is clearly meant to drive employers to revisit how they measure engineering productiveness. (Denisov-Blanch says he did the analysis as a result of he believes “software program engineering may benefit from transparency, accountability, and meritocracy and [he] is looking for an answer.”) That’s an awesome aim, however what about all of the CEOs who might even see the headline and demand that their ghost engineers be fired? Utilizing code commits as the one metric may find yourself eradicating a few of an organization’s high engineers, not essentially their worst ones.