There's an utterly ridiculous "study" out from Stanford about "ghost engineers" which are reportedly engineers who do nothing at companies.

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

@levampyre @samir you're about 7 years too late for that, but I'm certain that the company would've "found" evidence to support their claim despite having me change my visa to them and go permanent from freelance but a month earlier.

[levampyre@chaos.social]

@thisismissem Noooo! It's never too late to fight capitalist exploitation and abuse. Workers unite! @samir

[omegapolice@hachyderm.io]

@thisismissem What does "simulating a panel of 10 experts to evaluate each commit" even mean? Sounds like a concept of a plan, at best.

[erikriffle@mastodon.social]

@thisismissem have they considered simply asking the engineers what they do?

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

@erikriffle why would you do that when you could write a garbage paper promoting LLMs? /s

[tebriel@hachyderm.io]

@thisismissem @esk I would absolutely love to have more time to write code at work. I do so many other things though it’s hard to find projects where I can.

[mitka@hachyderm.io]

@thisismissem they are overlooking the commits you talk others out of.

Something something … chalk mark…

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

Hey, so someone wrote an article about this terrible paper too: https://yieldcode.blog/post/ghost-engineers/

And @changelog issues a retraction in their latest newsletter about the veracity of the claims:

[jackeric@beige.party]

@thisismissem paging @jasongorman

[jasongorman@mastodon.cloud]

@jackeric @thisismissem I had a DM conversation with the lead author. Executive summary: we're all stupid for not understanding it.

[mayank@front-end.social]

@thisismissem i totally missed this thread and the fact that changelog was covering it (incredibly disappointing, but good to see the retraction at least).

i'm totally with you on everything you said in the thread. it's just a bad excuse for justifying more surveillance.

i also had some other thoughts about "ghost engineers" here: https://front-end.social/@mayank/113567790493833082

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

@jasongorman @jackeric oooh, right. Haha, nope. If you put out claims in infographics and your research actually doesn't back up those claims, you've done crappy research.

Fwiw, I filed a complaint with the Stanford Ethics committee

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

@mayank not even more surveillance, but actively advocating for people to be laid off due to an utterly bullshit metric driven from an utterly flawed AI model.

[jasongorman@mastodon.cloud]

@thisismissem @jackeric A complaint about what? The study?

[thisismissem@hachyderm.io]

@jasongorman @jackeric the study and the infographics that actually have very little basis in that study