9.5% of software engineers are ghosts, doing virtually no work and might work multiple jobs

Stanford Study: 'Ghost Engineers' Costing Tech Companies Billions

A Stanford study analyzing over 50,000 software engineers across hundreds of companies found that around 9.5% of engineers do minimal work while still collecting full salaries—potentially costing the tech industry billions each year.

The problem appears to be most widespread in remote work settings, where 14% of engineers were classified as “ghost engineers”, compared to 6% among office-based employees. Researchers assessed productivity by analyzing private Git repositories and using simulated expert evaluations of code commits.

Large tech firms could be hit especially hard. The study estimates that IBM alone may have 17,100 underperforming engineers, costing the company $2.5 billion annually. On a global scale, the software industry could be losing up to $90 billion per year due to underperforming engineers, based on a conservative estimate of 6.5% ghost engineers worldwide.