New research from Stanford University finds that a tenth of software developers are ‘ghosts’ who ‘do virtually nothing.’ Oops.

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Research from Stanford suggests that nearly 10% of software engineers, referred to as 'ghosts,' do virtually nothing but collect hefty salaries. The study criticizes remote workers, implying they spend more time on non-work activities. However, the study's reliance on code commits as a measure of productivity is flawed since writing code is not the only, or most important, task for senior engineers. Effective software development involves understanding and managing software and translating business needs into technical implementations. Counting code commits can be misleading and potentially harmful if used as the sole productivity metric.

Are 10% of your software engineers lazy?

The research from Stanford uses the amount of code produced as the base metric for their research, which is a bad metric for productivity. We’ve been though this already in the 00s (2000-2010), where it was quite a common practice to pay developers by the lines of code they output. This just turned into boilerplate/spaghetti code paradise - for obvious reasons.
Our task isn’t simply writing code. The code is the final product of the whole thought and design process. This very process has a single goal: make a solution that’s on point, resistant to failure, efficient and as brief and maintainable as possible. And we’ve got other tasks as well: meetings, training and supervising junior engineers, documenting, etc. Clearly that contradicts using ones code output as a metric.
So, yeah - you can put that research in the dumpster. I’m glad the author of the article sees it in a similar way. I’m also concerned that a university with as much esteem in the tech world as Stanford has, could actually publish such a short-sighted and fundamentally flawed research.

95% developers can be 100% more productive without everyday meetings :)

TL;DR: Ideal software engineer is somewhere in between. Lazy enough to give a reliable solution, but not too industrious that they come up with a solution that only they understand.
I remember my teacher from university who had quite a interesting perspective. Almost all good engineers are lazy.
A lazy engineer will always try to find the most simple and efficient route to solve a problem. Okay, for a developer that might mean that it’s fastest way, not the most reliable solution, but I somehow doubt that the manager will mind.
The engineer that isn’t lazy, however, will try to find the most “elegant” solution. A solution that is complex and just wows. I can already imagine them processing a list using LINQ queries in C# with a ton of extension methods. When it will be to debug it, only the DEV and God know what it meant… and probably the DEV doesn’t remember either. See my point? Not lazy, often, (but not always) might result in code that’s hard to read (for the noobs) and hard to debug.
Ideal software engineer is somewhere in between. Lazy enough to give a reliable solution, but not too industrious that they come up with a solution that only they understand.

I really don’t agree with the metric used to determine this, which I also think is the case for most of us that have been in the industry for a while now.
However, for me, there’s a distinct contrast between colleagues. A handful of them push hard, show up, and actively try to improve the job for everyone in various ways.
Meanwhile, the majority seem to care very little beyond their own responsibilities and avoid anything that requires extra effort. So yeah, for me it would indicate that a lot of SWE colleagues are “lazy”, and I think this is the case for a lot of workplaces.