I find the idea of the Ghost jobs fascinating, and thank you for publishing the list of specific companies! But I still can’t imagine how that works.
My typical work experience (and I’ve had many jobs) is that there are sprints, you get some Jira tasks assigned, and you are supposed to have them finished by the end of the sprint. There is simply no way to accomplish that without making a few nontrivial commits in the version control; if you don’t close your Jira tasks the managers will notice; and if you perhaps tried to close the Jira task without writing the code, the testers would notice, and if not them, then definitely the customer would. Could someone please explain to me how specifically this works?
I am not a software engineer, and I’ve encountered cases where it seems plausible that an engineer has basically stopped putting in work. It can be tough to know for sure for a while even when you notice. But yeah, it shouldn’t be able to last for THAT long, but if no one is paying attention?
I’ve also had jobs where I’ve had periods with radically different hours worked, and where it would have been very difficult for others to tell which it was for a while if I was trying to hide it, which I wasn’t.
That probably means that their line manager stopped doing their work first.
Finding out who is working on what can be complicated e.g. if the person is assigned to multiple projects at the same time, and can tell everyone “sorry, the last few weeks I was too busy with the other projects”.
But checking in Jira “which tickets did this person close during the last 30 days” should be simple. If you don’t have a query for that, then you could still show all tickets assigned to this person, make a screenshot, and one month later check which of those tickets were closed if any. And you can set up Jira to show the links to the related commits (if you put the Jira task id in the commit descriptions, which was a rule at my recent jobs) in the ticket.
I would expect some companies to be so low on the technical skills that they couldn’t set up the system this way, but not the ones on the list.
I don’t doubt the stories, it’s just… one of those situations where other people seem to have skills that not only I don’t have, but can’t even imagine.
I find the idea of the Ghost jobs fascinating, and thank you for publishing the list of specific companies! But I still can’t imagine how that works.
My typical work experience (and I’ve had many jobs) is that there are sprints, you get some Jira tasks assigned, and you are supposed to have them finished by the end of the sprint. There is simply no way to accomplish that without making a few nontrivial commits in the version control; if you don’t close your Jira tasks the managers will notice; and if you perhaps tried to close the Jira task without writing the code, the testers would notice, and if not them, then definitely the customer would. Could someone please explain to me how specifically this works?
I am not a software engineer, and I’ve encountered cases where it seems plausible that an engineer has basically stopped putting in work. It can be tough to know for sure for a while even when you notice. But yeah, it shouldn’t be able to last for THAT long, but if no one is paying attention?
I’ve also had jobs where I’ve had periods with radically different hours worked, and where it would have been very difficult for others to tell which it was for a while if I was trying to hide it, which I wasn’t.
That probably means that their line manager stopped doing their work first.
Finding out who is working on what can be complicated e.g. if the person is assigned to multiple projects at the same time, and can tell everyone “sorry, the last few weeks I was too busy with the other projects”.
But checking in Jira “which tickets did this person close during the last 30 days” should be simple. If you don’t have a query for that, then you could still show all tickets assigned to this person, make a screenshot, and one month later check which of those tickets were closed if any. And you can set up Jira to show the links to the related commits (if you put the Jira task id in the commit descriptions, which was a rule at my recent jobs) in the ticket.
I would expect some companies to be so low on the technical skills that they couldn’t set up the system this way, but not the ones on the list.
I don’t doubt the stories, it’s just… one of those situations where other people seem to have skills that not only I don’t have, but can’t even imagine.