Ghosts of ‘lectricity

I haven’t written a post in a long old while. I saw a thread on Bluesky about ghost engineers and it felt like the perfect subject for a chilling festive post. Here we are.

So, Ghost Engineers. Roaming around just haunting repos by doing the bare minimum, huh? Spectral development stacking chairs and looming in TV static to keep the home owners suitably spooked. Ludicrous.

I am not a developer. I poke, prod, deploy, accumulate postman tests and cypress commits. I creep in slack threads. Corpse in meetings. Disturb the peace. Beyond that my work is quite invisible. I can do one ticket a day, I can do 17 (I did actually one day in May). At neither point did I feel I did enough work. Did I feel at rest.

“The reasons my molars are so broken is I spend too much time ghosting with the likes of you and yours” Ghosting – Freelance Whales

What is the bare minimum of output when the basis for output is constantly in flux?

Developer work is far more visible. Reams of code, essays of tickets, epics of technical diagrams/documentation, tomes of code review comments, seances of pipelines and tangles of tests. Not to mention all the meetings, slacks threads and huddles.

“Day and night they toil. Bringing boxes of decrepid earth from the bowels of the castle” Bram Stokers Dracula

This haunting is real and it has full possession. It is corporeal, chain rattling to the max.

However again the bare minimum is extremely subjective. There is not a baseline for output. Yes, there are story points, but they vary wildly between teams, developers, months, seasons and have evolved into a measure that is not really substantial.

“Which is as thin of substance as the air, and more inconstant than the wind,” Romeo & Juliet – Shakespeare

So do you measure lines of code? More code, more output right? No, again volume is not a sign of anything. It is quality not quantity.

So to quality. Do you qualify it by lack of defects? Tickets nagging the board, refusing the give up the ghost? Dispossessed code review comments that won’t be exorcised, the ever insidious dripping of scope creep or tickets so mangled they are written in tongues?

Maybe we are haunted but the ghosts are not us, the engineers. It is not Deus ex machina, it is an eerie umbra ex machina with a shuffling life of its own.

I do feel faded, diminished and tainted by previous ability to get more done. I am aware that I am not 100% and sometimes trapped in a loop with a lack of resilience to break out from spooky pattern.

“But I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong and that somehow was I wrong about everything” Solaris 2002

@meowy24

#alwaysbetesting