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 affirm his and the opposite researchers’ finger-pointing at low ranges of Git commits as dispositive proof of builders “ghosting” their employers. Nor does it affirm his “don’t-quote-me-on-this” argument that the analysis additionally exhibits that “the highest 25% of engineers contributed about 50% to 60% of the output,” although that discovering could also be extra intuitively appropriate, given the 80/20 rule.)
Much less code could 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 appear to assume. For instance, Nvidia Senior Engineering Supervisor Aaron Erickson factors out that the researchers may discover “one other 10% of engineers who do add code, however it’s ineffective abstractions or vainness rework that provides damaging worth and confusion.” Stanford’s analysis would say that these are precious engineers, however in actuality, they may 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 evaluate.
All of it is a great distance of claiming the analysis could not say what the researchers imagine. This wouldn’t be a giant 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 ideal purpose, 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 might find yourself eradicating a few of an organization’s prime engineers, not essentially their worst ones.
