Ghost Engineers with Yegor Denisov-Blanch and Simon Obstbaum

In this episode, I chat with Yegor Denisov-Blanch about the research we're doing at Stanford on developer productivity. We unpack some of our key findings, including the surprising discovery that about 9.5% of engineers—what we call "ghost engineers"—make minimal contributions.We explore the difficulties of accurately measuring engineering output versus true productivity, and explain our data-driven framework for evaluating software engineering performance. The discussion also covers how engineers add value in different ways, how personal life situations can impact motivation, and how we leveraged source code and Git metadata in our analysis.We highlight why it's crucial to quantify engineering impact and share that our research has already collected data from more than 50,000 developers.