Are 10% of your software engineers lazy? [Video]

New research from Stanford University finds that a tenth of software developers are ‘ghosts’ who ‘do virtually nothing.’ Oops.

Nearly 10% of all software engineers are “ghosts” who “do virtually nothing” but collect $300K salaries. This, according to research from Stanford University. The paper takes particular aim at engineers who work remotely, declaring that 14% of them apparently spend more time gardening than tending to their Git repositories. Controversial? Yes. Accurate? Almost certainly not—at least, not based on this particular analysis of more than 50,000 engineers. The analysis makes for great sound bites but poor understanding of how software development works.

Do you believe in ghosts?

The point of the research is apparently to suggest that cutting these 9.5% “ghosts” would save $90 billion, as Stanford researcher Yegor Denisov-Blanch notes. It is, of course, very possible (even probable) that 10% of the developers within any company are low performers. Any job category will have a tier of relatively low-performing people. But it’s not at all …