December 2024 — Ghost In The Machine

It’s been a great month - for those in crypto. For those that missed out, don’t worry. I’m sure there will be  plenty more dips for you to hodl into in the future.

Ghost In The Machine

We’ve all heard about the 10x engineer, but anyone who has worked in a large company knows the 0.1x engineer. The guy who somehow manages to do the bare minimum but not get fired.

A study from Stanford University casts additional light on this phenomenon. Their research shows that almost 10% of engineers are ‘ghosts’; people who effectively don’t do anything.

Judging software engineering productivity is very hard - almost all metrics are flawed, and at risk of manipulation (see Goodhart's law). But the inverse is very telling - while the difference between one commit a day vs two is perhaps style, one commit a week needs looking into.

At MISSION+, we have been experimenting with using LinearB on our projects. Early results have been positive. It is a relatively straightforward visualization of your repositories, along with your task tracking platform, integrated into a dashboard where you can see who is doing what.

If ghost employees know that commit velocity is being tracked, it isn’t hard for them to fake this - but it’s still a worthy metric to at least review. As is often the case, the biggest issue isn’t even the ghost engineer, it’s the impact on overall morale and team cohesion; no-one wants to be on a team that isn’t performing.

One can obviously take this kind of reporting too far - but in many cases, it’s as simple as it seems. Some cases may be ghosts. Some cases may be people not following best practices (e.g. huge commits at the end of a sprint). All cases are worth investigating.

Some of my preferred statistics to uncover conversations:

1. Only committing a handful of times a month.

2. Only raising a handful of Pull Requests a month (assuming you use PRs).

3. Only a handful of tickets go to ‘Closed’ state in a month - this might not be the developer’s fault, it may expose inefficiencies in the overall system.

This is of course in addition to any DORA-style reviews you may be doing, but by taking a monthly snapshot of the above, you might just discover the Ghost in the Machine.

Interesting Articles

• Facebook’s Little Red Book - a peak behind the curtain of early(ish) Facebook culture. It’s an internal manual that was distributed to employees to convey the company’s mission - pretty inspiring stuff!

• Neal.fun - a bunch of interactive infotainment pages. Some really fun stuff in there - the depth of the ocean visualization was fascinating. 

• How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? - the “Turing Test” (a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit human-like intelligence through conversation) is fairly redundant now. But with every door closed, a new one opens…

• React Scan - easily visualise when a web page is doing an unnecessary render in the React framework. The author ran this on some popular websites, and man does the internet suck…

This Is The Way

Mission Accomplished

📈 Enhancing efficiency in corporate sustainability reporting
Changing regulations in Europe created a business opportunity, prompting MISSION+ to develop a MVP that a company is now leveraging to expand their offering and engage existing customers.

❇️  Using AI to boost consumer engagement
The board of a listed company turned to us to evaluate open-source AI technologies alongside their proprietary product. This brought about a rethink in how they introduce new technology into their existing solution.

✏️ Concept to MVP in 8 weeks
We assembled a small team, led by an experienced Fractional CTO to help accelerate the MVP build for an early stage Climate Tech startup allowing them to unlock next stage funding and provide a foundation for their first customers to trial.

Feature A Fractional

We’re On A Mission

And for those that celebrate, Merry Christmas 🎄

Until next month,

Ned & the MISSION+ team

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