There's an utterly ridiculous "study" out from Stanford about "ghost engineers" which are reportedly engineers who do nothing at companies.
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@kissane based on the author's previous paper, I'm gunna guess yes: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/predicting-expert-evaluations-software-code-reviews
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@thisismissem gooooo it's all goo
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Ha, surprise surprise, this isn't actually a "pre-print" at all, but uses another pre-print's data by the same author(s), and even in that pre-print looking at Predicting Expert Evaluations in Software Code Reviews the data seems woefully flawed
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@thisismissem Useless then. These days, for better or worse, a whole lot of my code is written by my IDE via automation or #Copilot. Sure, I *start* typing a line, and the rest is done for me.
The *vast* majority of my time is spent interacting with users, developers, thinking and discussing new features, bug fixes, and the like.
Coding is a small, but important part of being a developer. If all someone measures is code output though, that's useless.
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@thisismissem "simulated" as in... they got a bunch of LLMs to read it and make value judgements about a thing that's a bad metric in the first place?
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@Floppy probably. I can't actually find claimed pre-print, but they've another pre-print which conspicuously uses the same sample sizes for data, data which wasn't collected properly from what I can tell.
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@thisismissem @jaredwhite I think it means “figure out a way to blame the engineers for everything that goes wrong, as cheaply as possible!”
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This post is deleted!
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@thisismissem A colleague of mine told us how their software engineering manager measured productivity by counting semicolons written per week back in the 90s.
It was only a matter of time until they started using semicolons to frame their comments.
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@thisismissem Where can I apply to be a ghost engineer?
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@Jeff @drahardja probably at: https://careers.ghost.org
(Joking aside on that term, the Ghost team do some fantastic work)
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I contracted a helpdesk gig where I made myself reportback liason and the client didnt renew me and the contractor wouldnt leave me alone for a year and I still talk to them every so often about Hospital/clinic placements
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@thisismissem do you have a DOI?
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@DenialShown nah, it was a bunch of tweets by a person that worked on a pre-print that was assessing something else. The "pre-print" claim by this person appeared to mostly just be lending credibility to what he was saying, along with using Stanford's name for legitimacy
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Hrefna (DHC)replied to Emelia 👸🏻 last edited by [email protected]
This matches my impression as well.
Is it too much to hope that his faculty adviser throws him out on his ear for this nonsense?
Oh wait his faculty adviser is a business and psych researcher who regularly goes outside of his lane.
Sigh.
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@drahardja @blogdiva @thisismissem
Goodhart's Law strikes again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law -
@samir In Germany it would be invalid to fire someone w/o a warning. So the moment I'd get that warning judging my none performance based on not enough code changes I'd maliciously comply and do lots and lots of commits just to teach everybody the meaning of Goodhart's law by example.
@thisismissem -
@rockylhotka @thisismissem My favorite performance metric is actually LOC *removed*.
Quality over quantity, every time.
I'm lucky that I have a client who gets that and is also happy to allocate some budget to writing documentation.
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@thisismissem there's probably a pretty interesting paper to write on how to remove bias and improve accuracy in selecting a group of humans to review someone else's code and impact..
But I can almost already imagine this one didn't waste time on that kind of scientific rigor
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@hrefna @DenialShown will be interesting to see what the ethics committee says about this
