Stairway to Ghosting

I fell the fuck down the stairs.

Rather than land straight on my ass though, I had the presence of body to reach up and catch the stairs above to break my fall, which forced my shoulder momentarily to dislocate I think, and then pop back into place. Well, that woke me up, because I haven't felt pain like that in a while. At first I thought I had broken it, but it seems to be moving, so if I haven't torn anything too badly, I might have "got away" with it. Though, depending on how it feels in the morning, I might head over to the doctor for a check-up, while I still have private work cover. At least, they might give me some decent painkillers.

Heard of ghost workers?

I was reading an article that studied 50,000 software engineers at hundreds of companies and it discovered that almost 10% did "virtually nothing", with them doing less than ten percent of the median engineer. That is the middle marker, not the best of the group. And these are professionals, getting paid as professionals. Apparently, the average salary for a SwE in the US is about 130K, which means that collectively, these 5000% people who are performing very, very poorly, are getting paid around $650,000,000 a year, for doing next to know work.

Not a bad gig!
Note: If anyone knows where I might get something like this, please let me know, as I am looking.

And the other thing that was interesting to discover from the study, is,

The research, which has not been peer reviewed, found 14 per cent of software engineers working remotely do “almost no work”, compared to nine per cent in hybrid roles and six per cent in the office. However, engineers were much more likely to work from home and more top performing employees worked remotely rather than in the office.

So, while more top-performing worked from home, far more non-performing did also. As suspected really, isn't it? Sure, some people might perform highly from home, but a lot also won't perform, even though they are getting paid. In fact, the people who held the study suggested that the work submitted is so low, the workers might have another job on the side - or perhaps their main job? - With work submitted being 10% of the median, they might have ten similar jobs I guess, and take home 1.5 million a year.

two quotes I found amusing:

“And no, AI is not writing their code. Most of these people are chilling so hard they have no idea what AI can do,”

“Most people in tech were never surprised that Elon could lay off 80 per cent of Twitter, you can lay off 80 per cent of most of these companies.”

Lols.

What might be interesting with this subset of employees though, is that it is relatively easy to track the numbers, but still they are able to get away with it. Just imagine all the people in other roles that are far less quantitative, and quality is subjective. I am guess that at the very least, the 10% is going to hold true across an entire organization. And, the organizations know it, and are trying to address the situation by getting people back into the office. Even if they can't get rid of all the people, it would have an effect if they could for instance, get 20% of the median out of these people instead.

I am no fan of corporations.

However, I am also not a fan of people who cheat the systems in place, because eventually, it means that the rest are going to lose privileges because of it. This is likely a lot of what we are seeing in the organizations now who are forcing workers back into the office, because they have been crunching the number and on average it would make them more money if people were in the office, than not. They don't care about employee convenience, if it means a loss of profits.

Human behaviour is pretty predictable, and when people are "unsupervised" they are more likely to act as they want to act, rather than how they "should" act. For the majority of people, work is a means to an end to get paid, which means that if they can get paid without doing the work, all the better. And while it is obvious that not all people will give into the temptation to play hooky when no one is around, there will always be some percentage that do.

But, these ghost workers are actually not the biggest issue, but rather, there are also those who are just above them on the scale and all the way up to the median, and possibly above. Productivity isn't just being lost under the 10% mark, it is being lost all the way up, and this is going to likely add up to more and create and compound other problems at scale.

I wonder what would happen if there was a perfect way to evaluate work performed and reward based on the value. For instance, using the setup of 100 software engineers earning 100K for the job, that would be a total salary of 10 million. But, what if it was distributed based on contribution, so the 10 who only did 10% of the median, will only get paid 1% out of the total pool, splitting 100,000 between them, so get 10K each and so on upward. And, this extra savings pool, would be distributed to reward people who are above the median.