I think I can explain why it appears that there are ghost engineers. My favorite metaphor is a one-lane road vs a two lane road. On a one lane road, you can o

I think I can explain why it appears that there are ghost engineers. My favorite metaphor is a one-lane road vs a two lane road. On a one lane road, you can only travel as fast as the slowest car on the road. A two-lane road is far more efficient than two one-lane roads are. But think of how programming teams are organized. Typically, there's only one programmer who is expert enough for a certainly functionality to fix bugs (faster than they introduce new ones, anyways.) That means the bug takes a one-lane road to and from the programmer who is going to fix it. The programmer can only fix bugs as fast as it takes him to fix the hardest, and slowest bug. So, say you have a service-level agreement with your customers--if they file a bug, you'll fix it in 5 days. So a bug comes in--what if the only programmer who can fix it is already in the middle of fixing a 5-day bug? So obviously, more programmers need to be hired. If you have two programmers who are in charge of each functionality, it's like having a 2-lane road instead of a 1 -lane road. You have VASTLY shorter turn-around times on average. While one programmer is fixing a 5-day bug, another one can be working on five 1-day bugs. But....now what? You hire double the number of programmers? So every programmer, old and new, is idle around 50% of the time? That is where the so-called "Ghost Programmers" come from. So, the obvious thing to do is fire half the programmers. Great. Say you do that. Say you have 1 programmer on your team, who writes tight, efficient, virtually bug-free code which is so generic that it can handle not only the current requirements but also handles a lot of the future requirements. So this programmer is still not as busy as that guy who introduces a new bug every time he fixes an old one. THAT guy's mouse is moving a lot, THAT guy is busy staying after 5:00pm every day.... ...and THAT guy gets to keep his job when management wants to fire all of the ghost programmers.