As a previous so-called 'ghost engineer', it took three people to replace me, and four months for damage control when I wasn't there to keep things in top shape. There was documentation to keep things running, but since I wrote that documentation and "my contributions weren't necessary foe the team's success" Well. Why leave them?

Sometimes I feel like I do nothing.

My productivity is pretty low since I got promoted to one of our “lead developers.” So much of my time is spent looking at other people’s code, answering questions, mentoring, etc. Task switching becomes a huge issue, where even if I have time I’ve been pulled back and forth and it takes me like an hour to get back into whatever I was doing. It can take weeks for me to close tickets sometimes. And sometimes even when I have busy days, I come away feeling like I did nothing.

It’s definitely giving me Peter Principle vibes sometimes. And though my manager always tells me I’m doing good work, I feel like he’s too disconnected from my day-to-day, and that surely my Scrum Master and Product Owner are trying to get me replaced.

It’s…not a great state of mind, even if I know it’s bullshit. They wouldn’t be giving me raises if they didn’t think I was worth it. But…still. I’ve never stayed at the same job this long, and part of me keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Imposter syndrome is a bitch.

I’m one of those who “do nothing”, if you’re measuring by commits and lines of code.

• as an architect, I spend way too much time doing diagrams and presentation
• as a point of engineering escalation, I spend a lot of time researching things no one can figure out
• as a stickler for code quality, I like nothing more than those days where my lines of code are negative

On the other hand, if you go by the amount of code I indirectly effect with best practices, code quality, appsec, and assisting developers, I affect all of engineering (hundreds)

I've seen this claim recently and it's rubbish.

Yes, if by "nothing" we mean writing next to no code, because they're busy either:

• architecting software solutions, as they're knowledgeable enough that they should be doing this instead of writing code
• understanding a lot of what is going on in components and/or the system so that when there's an issue they say "oh, this is likely because of X" and the resolution takes days instead of weeks.

I.e. yes, there is a percentage of developers who we pile other tasks on and they don't get to write code.

My experience is that the more knowledgeable developers get, the less code they write.

Then neurodivergent peeps are different - an Autistic dev might be super knowledgeable and happy writing unit tests because they don't enjoy the uncertainty of large problems, or an ADHD developer might have a large system-wide view but write what seem like small contributions.

Yet more bullshit probably aimed at RTO. Corporate media will keep pushing the same narrative.

There is a difference between productivity and activity, you can be 100% active at work all day, yet 0% productive. Imagine you work on a project for 6 months and then the manager decide to drop the project. You have been unproductive for 6 months, doesn't mean you were slacking off, but in the end when we calculate the productivity of developers, it is lower because of this.