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I see people are still talking about “ghost” engineers. I have opinions. But a quick recap. I saw a random tweet. No supporting data. Stanford. 10% of eng don’t write enough lines of code. Ergo they have no value. You can RIF them.
Ok, I think I just took the sentiment to its logical conclusion but you get the point. So let’s talk about ghosts. I grew up at a time where you had ghosts talking to us through the tv and telling us to go into the light. I think we can all agree, those are the bad ghosts. I read a book by Nora Roberts called The Mirror. That’s the best divide I can think of between good and bad ghosts. Most of the ghosts in the house keep it clean, care for the humans and pets. I’d 100% have those ghosts in my house. They have one bad ghost apple in the house. So I think we need to ask ourselves, are ghost engineers friendly or not?
People who have been in the business long can all agree, you WANT a friendly ghost engineer. You want the person who understands the dependencies, who can identify code or infrastructure that can be pruned in order to make the stack more secure, stable, and performant. You want the ghost who can see that the new set of features is going to need more infrastructure and has already built the relationship with Ops, DevRel, and CS. In fact in olden times we called this person the architect. And the architects who were truly architects were what kept the company afloat.
There are plenty of people who are who are about why we need to adjust how we which at the core is how this came about. From a Product perspective, not having a true architect anymore, I now have to seek out who is of this role in each company. work and why it’s important. To be clear, this person is doing a TON of free labor for the company. Meaning, we have a label problem not a “ghost” problem.
If you are smart, instead of considering if you need to RIF these folks, you will dig deep to see how much of a raise or cash bonus you can give them and maybe change their title to something that reflects their actual role. These are the ghosts you are looking for.
Ok, I think I just took the sentiment to its logical conclusion but you get the point. So let’s talk about ghosts. I grew up at a time where you had ghosts talking to us through the tv and telling us to go into the light. I think we can all agree, those are the bad ghosts. I read a book by Nora Roberts called The Mirror. That’s the best divide I can think of between good and bad ghosts. Most of the ghosts in the house keep it clean, care for the humans and pets. I’d 100% have those ghosts in my house. They have one bad ghost apple in the house. So I think we need to ask ourselves, are ghost engineers friendly or not?
People who have been in the business long can all agree, you WANT a friendly ghost engineer. You want the person who understands the dependencies, who can identify code or infrastructure that can be pruned in order to make the stack more secure, stable, and performant. You want the ghost who can see that the new set of features is going to need more infrastructure and has already built the relationship with Ops, DevRel, and CS. In fact in olden times we called this person the architect. And the architects who were truly architects were what kept the company afloat.
There are plenty of people who are who are about why we need to adjust how we which at the core is how this came about. From a Product perspective, not having a true architect anymore, I now have to seek out who is of this role in each company. work and why it’s important. To be clear, this person is doing a TON of free labor for the company. Meaning, we have a label problem not a “ghost” problem.
If you are smart, instead of considering if you need to RIF these folks, you will dig deep to see how much of a raise or cash bonus you can give them and maybe change their title to something that reflects their actual role. These are the ghosts you are looking for.