Engagement

A junk “study” about “ghost engineers” popped up a few weeks ago claiming that 9.5% of software developers do nothing. The author, Yegor Denisov-Blanch, has consistently dodged questions about methodology and refused to share data, but I’m willing to bet his work has been seen by more practitioners in the past 30 days than every careful, peer-reviewed piece of empirical software engineering research published this year. I think it would be very cool if an enterprising grad student proved this, i.e., estimated the number of times Denisov-Blanch’s work has been viewed or mentioned and compared it to the number of views and mentions of work from ICSE or Empirical Software Engineering.

More importantly, I think the software engineering research community should ask themselves why stuff like this gets so much attention when their work doesn’t, and ask themselves what they should do in order to have that kind of impact. Public health researchers are doing this kind of critical reflection right now to figure out how anti-vaccination conspiracy theories have displaced actual science in so many people’s minds so that they can fight back; if people who study software and software developers want to do more than just observe—if they want to have some actual impact—I think they would do well to look at why bullshit finds such a large audience.