The Self-Driven Child

What I Learned About Motivation From "Ghost Buster" Yegor Denisov-blanch

• Ned Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 45

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What if some of the people on your team weren’t actually working—but just good at looking busy? In this episode, I sit down with Yegor Denisov-Blanch to discuss a fascinating and troubling trend in the tech world: ghost engineers. These are software developers whose productivity is so low that they barely contribute—yet they manage to stay employed. Yegor, a researcher dedicated to improving software engineering performance, dives into what causes this phenomenon, why it’s more common than you’d think, and how it affects company culture, team morale, and overall efficiency. But instead of just calling them out, his goal is to understand why this happens—and how to fix it.

We also explore how the same disengagement issues that plague workplaces show up in schools. Yegor shares his own unconventional education journey, having dropped out of the traditional system at 14, teaching himself to code, and later excelling in university. What does this say about the way we measure productivity and success—not just in work, but in learning? 

 

Episode Highlights:

[00:49] - What exactly is a ghost engineer, and why are companies unknowingly paying them?

[03:41] - The research behind software engineer performance and why measuring it has been difficult.

[06:38] - How ghost engineers operate—are they just lazy, or is there something deeper going on?

[10:41] - The surprising psychological and workplace culture factors that push employees toward disengagement.

[15:22] - The role of trust in the workplace and why micromanagement can actually increase disengagement.

[23:30] - How remote work has changed productivity—for better and worse.

[25:18] - Yegor’s unconventional education journey: Dropping out of 8th grade, starting a business at 14, and later graduating top of his class.

[32:24] - How personalized learning and self-directed education could prevent disengagement in students before they enter the workforce.

[40:30] - The bigger mission: Not just exposing ghost engineers, but fixing the system so they don’t need to exist.

 

Links & Resources:

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If you have a high school aged student and would like to talk about putting a tutoring or college plan together, reach out to Ned's company, PrepMatters at www.prepmatters.com

Ned Johnson:

Hey, folks, Ned here, over the past 25 years, I've talked with 1000s of parents of high school students, parents who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed, but these parents need to work with the team they trust, one which is pile on more pressure to achieve better grades and scores. This is why I started prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation, tutoring in college admissions, planning. This podcast and my books reflect our company's philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school student and would like to talk about putting in place a plan, please get in touch with us. Visit our website@prepmatters.com or call 301-951-0350 19510350, that's 301-951-0350 thanks. And after our show, so

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

a ghost engineer is someone whose full time job is to write code. They're not spending an excessive amount of time doing other things such as sales or mentoring or something else, right? They're full time code writers and whose performance or productivity is less than 10% of the median software engineer in their industry. So it means they're essentially silent quitters or showing up to work, logging in, but not getting so much work done. Welcome

Ned Johnson:

to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William stickstroot of the books the self driven child the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives and what do you say? How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress tolerance and a happy home when you know your kid has work to be done and you can see they're on their computer, do you trust them? It looks like they're working hard, but on what if you could track them and see what they're doing or not doing? Would you and if you learned that they weren't really doing work, would you bust them? Would you try to get the bottom of why and maybe what could help? I think you'll enjoy this conversation about the adult working world equivalent from a fascinating story about ghost engineers and the tech guru who busted them, but in the end, who turned out to be more of a ghost whisperer. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Well, Igor, thanks, thanks for joining our podcast. I am really looking forward to jumping into this article that you wrote or that you were profiled in The Washington Post about ghost coders and what that is all about. But before we dig in there, can you share with folks a little bit about the work that you do?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Sure, first thing that thank you so much for featuring me as a guest on on the podcast. You're welcome heard at the research in 2022 and what we do is we try and understand a bit better how to measure and improve the performance of software engineers. And this addresses a need that in the past, because software engineers had so much bargaining power and there were a bit of different dynamics, this space wasn't super developed. And so over the past two plus years, we've been working with hundreds of companies and enrolled more than 50,000 individual software engineers as research participants in this and you know, we've published this first set of results, and are very excited to continue publishing interesting insights so as to improve the way that software engineers can work, so that we can use data to make better decisions about everything that concerns them, especially now with AI and how that is going To change the profession. So

Ned Johnson:

was this an area of interest to you, or did folks come to you and say, Hey, we're trying to analyze what's going on here, and tasked you with doing this research. It

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

was an area of interest for me, both personally and professionally, personally, because I felt like software engineers, there needs to be a bit more transparency and meritocracy and values with which are really kind of align. And this wasn't necessarily the case in the software engineering industry. There's like, lots of politics, lots of smoke and mirrors, so to so to speak. And so to me, it felt very intrinsically rewarding to be able to work on something which can allow more transparency and we can, which can create tighter feedback loops between effort and reward, especially for those high performing engineers who aren't necessarily the most vocal, which are the ones that we're kind of losing out in this whole thing. And then professionally, I've, you know, I self taught myself how to code about almost 20 years ago, and I've also worked in this space around, you know, engineering teams and engineering organizations in a professional capacity. And so when I, when I came to Stanford in 22 it felt like the perfect mix of personal and professional backgrounds to to continue or to look into this a bit

Ned Johnson:

further. Yeah. So the meritocracy and transparency. Let me repeat that back. So I take that to mean your and folks like you who are really, really enjoy this work and work hard and care about doing it. Well, we're looking to your right or looking to your left and seeing people who are like Ned is seriously slacking, but because he never shuts up, he's maybe more, you know, extroverted. He's getting all this credit he's not actually doing anything. Is that kind of it

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

sort of, yeah, and there's different flavors and extremes of that. But essentially, sometimes or oftentimes, in the workplace, especially around software, those who are most vocal or are best at positioning and framing their own work often reap more benefit and reward than those who actually are executing and doing the work. And to me, at a philosophical level, that doesn't feel super efficient and value add and doesn't sit quite right. And so anything that to work in addressing that is something that I align very much with I could imagine

Ned Johnson:

as a as a person who is a little bit noisier than other people and with precisely no coding skills whatsoever. I'm deeply offended by the premise of your work, but that's that's cool. So, so what did you find when you were what did you find? And were you surprised by what you found?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

We found so many things, and we're still crunching through the data. We're still getting lots of companies that are participating and enrolling in the research and whatnot, maybe zooming in on the ghost engineer phenomenon. So,

Ned Johnson:

yeah, they have defined that for folks. I mean, they can probably guess what that is, but, but paint a picture. What does that what does that look like?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Sure. So a ghost engineer is someone whose full time job is to write code. They're not spending an excessive amount of time doing other things such as sales or mentoring or something else, right? They're full time code writers and whose performance or productivity is less than 10% of the median software engineer in their industry. So it means they're essentially silent quitters or showing up to work, logging in, but not getting so much work done. So that's what a ghost engineer is. And what we found is, you know, firstly, across our entire data set, roughly nine to nine and a half 10% of software engineers could be categorized in this in this category as ghost engineers. This changes based on company size, industry type. It's a bit more prevalent in larger companies than in smaller ones. We found, but also in smaller teams. We can. We also see this phenomenon as well. And in fact, talking to some other industry peers and researchers, some have told me that the 9.5% figure may be understated, and that in their anecdotal evidence, they've sometimes oftentimes seen that this is much higher than that. So I think this is attributed to the way in which we calculated the metric, and I think our methodology was good, because when we were unsure whether someone was a full time coder or not, we would exclude that person. So then this way there was minimizing false positive and and also false negatives. So,

Ned Johnson:

so effectively, freeloaders, right? Essentially, yes, yeah. And so what? What I can guess. But apart from the financial of you know, Company X is paying me to do work that I'm not doing. What are the other impacts on, you know, corporate culture or colleagues, and what were you seeing? What do you suspect?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Yeah, so in, I mean, I've had the pleasure of chatting with a lot of these ghost engineers themselves, who have reached out after our work got covered nationally, and we talked either through voice or, you know, through emails and messages and whatnot. And there's a whole bunch of reasons which we can dig into around, like, why they're doing it, but maybe zooming in onto the impact on the teams. So typically software engineers are compensated in terms of, like, salary levels or bands, right? And so when you're part of the team, you probably have peers, and you more or less, can estimate how much they're making. And it's very demotivating. When you show up to work, you put in good work, you maybe, you know, stay later a couple of days and and you're doing your job, and you're really pushing the team forward. And then you look to your right, you look to your left, and you see people getting the same amount of compensation, and they're essentially doing very little work, and that puts in moral drag, on, on, on the person actually doing the work. So then it makes the entire team less productive. When you extrapolate this to the organizational level, it gets a bit more complicated because of department politics and whatnot. But this effect is exacerbated. And I think the reason around why managers who have a lot of visibility into these you know, into the performance of their teams, and when you're looking after 510, 20 people, you should be able to understand what each one of them is doing. The incentives are in. A line for managers to surface that part of their team isn't doing much, and this is often like a slippery slope whereby you can gradually let people, or allow people to do less and less work, and then by the time you're essentially silently quit, if you raise it to HR or to your boss, like, let's say you're a manager, and you tell your boss, hey, you know, two people on my team of 10 or slacking, your boss is going to be like, well, that's your fault, and go fix it. Right? What I'm my point is that it's not in the manager's best incentive to actually address this, so it allows the situation to happen. And there's, there's many factors at play, but this isn't a very big one around why this? This happens specifically. Now, one

Ned Johnson:

of the things that was talked about, one of the things that surprised me in the reporting was some of the reasons why people were doing this, you know, ghost in or quiet quitting, you know, because it's easy for me to imagine, well, you know, like I collect the salary. I just hit, you know, auto reply and everything, and I go out and, you know, near the west coast, go surfing, or I become an Uber driver, or I just sleep with whatever. You know, but some of it was more. It seemed like it was more than just lack of a better word, great greed or laziness. There were some other things that came up. Can you talk about that?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Absolutely. So there's, of course, exceptions for everything and different situations. But the trend I've seen from talking to a few dozen of these folks is that it oftentimes starts off as a person with no malicious intent, right? Because, I mean, at at a human level, everyone wants to feel like they're doing good work and they're getting again compensated, and their work is is kind of having an impact on their department, customers, whatever it may be, right? Team Player, all that, yeah, no, I mean, and that's a very human set of attributes and behaviors to exhibit. However, at some point, with a lot of these ghost engineers, what happened is that they became frustrated with their work. And this could be perhaps around, you know, other people getting more rewards than they or their work not being recognized, or someone, you know, maybe kind of stealing credit from for what they did. Or perhaps the things are just moving too slow, and then they're feeling like, no matter if they invest 100% of their potential or 10% of their potential, the output at the other end of the equation is the same. And so at that point, if you're like, Well, I want to do good work, but if it doesn't matter how much effort I put, why not just put the minimal effort, and then nothing really changes. And I'm, you know, just going to continue collecting my paycheck, going through the motions and essentially being disengaged from work.

Ned Johnson:

And there was a there was a story in there about an engineer who, just as you're describing, I guess he and a colleague were frustrated for the reasons you're describing, and kind of hoodwinked their supervisor to make a

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

point. Yeah. So could you define hoodwinked for me? Oh my

Ned Johnson:

god. So, so these two guys, they, they basically, you know, put in all the reports and acted like they were doing all this work, and we were kind of basically doing nothing but making it look like they were doing work. And at the end of the couple three weeks, they went to their manager and told him or her what they just done.

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Yeah. So, I mean, this is, it's a phenomenon that is pretty prevalent in the sense that there is existing ways to kind of track the productivity of these engineers. I must admit, I don't recall the story specifically. This was, I mean, well,

Ned Johnson:

I'll keep I'll keep going with so what are to your point about people don't start out being, you know, Ill intentioned. The stories I recall, you know, Ned and Igor, you know, we're sort of frustrated because they're not getting credit, and the work they're doing is silly, and then blah, blah, blah, so we just start putting, you know, fabricating our timesheets or whatever. And at the end of two weeks, went to the manager and pointed out, and the person just couldn't believe what had happened. But out of this came, rather than, okay, Ned, you're you're out of here. They had a conversation about the nature of the work and how to, frankly, have the manager be pay more attention so that they were doing work that felt more meaningful to them. And that was because I can, my default reaction was like, yeah, these guys are a bunch of slackers, right? Every every corporation like, let's identify these guys and sack them all. But it was interesting that these folks, to their credit and their manager, at least for the time being, use this as an opportunity to really address the level of disengagement that folks were having.

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

So underlying theme here is that perhaps you can, you can really fake being engaged, and it works, and it works very frequently, right? But I would say that the behavior and or the situation which panned out in this case is rather the exception other than the norm. Usually, if this would surface, there would be consequences, either for the employees or, you know, something a bit more negative, or. They're not like, Oh, thanks for pointing that out. That's fantastic proof you have brought forward. Let's try and find a way of addressing it. And so this is why, you know, you get into these Nash equilibrium game theory dynamics whereby parties are incentivized to behave in a certain way because they cannot predict the reaction or behavior of the other party. Yeah, we just found that.

Ned Johnson:

In fact, pulled up the article, found the line so Patel said he was shocked. We sat him down and we explained him that we were frustrated. Patel and his colleague asked for less micromanagement of daily tasks and more deep engagement on the problems where they're trying to solve. Manager took up the suggestions. Engineers got more done. Quote, we were a little more efficient. We enjoyed working, you know. And obviously it's a curious thing, because you would imagine at the bottom line, these are for profit enterprises. They want people to work harder and be more efficient as an employee. You want to be fairly compensated, but you also want to be more deeply engaged. And the idea that with more autonomy and deeper engagement, you actually get that greater greater efficiency. I'll make a quick note of an interview I had a couple weeks ago with Dr Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson, who are authors of a book called The disengaged teen. And they were looking at kind of categories of kids in school and how engaged they were. And so they they identified passengers who were just coasting, which would be your your ghost, coders, achievers, resistors, who spent all their energy, you know, presumably acting like they're doing stuff, but really fighting it, and only a small subset of people who were both deeply, who were engaged agentically, so really felt that they had agency. I imagine that's hard for you know, I'm curious to know your experience, if it's a large organization with lots and lots of teams, do you feel that it's hard, or have you seen six places that are successful for your supervisor, manager, whoever, whoever might be, you know, coming with directives to give You both the agency and the autonomy that you crave, but also, as you meant mentioned before, kind of enough transparency for me to know that you're actually, you don't take that, you know, autonomy and just run to the beach, right? But I'm not, I'm not micromanaging you up the up to your ears so that you, you know, feel really low autonomy. How have you seen that done? Well,

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

well, I think there's two levers that impact whether this kind of relationship can successfully exist. The first one is that there needs to be a high amount of trust between the employee and the manager, and this trust needs to be sustained and maintained as the organization grows and scales. And secondly, then is that this trust has to be stronger than any conflicting interests between the manager and the employee. Hmm,

Ned Johnson:

my bonus is on the line for your production, but the trust we had before is, I'm not going to betray the professional respect that we have in order to eke out another 5000 bucks.

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Well, trust is so you know this whole notion of trust, it's important because if you don't trust someone, you need to implement metrics or methods of verifying that person's work. Once you do that, then the other party, the one who is being tracked, is incentivized to, in turn, try and spend their brain power, hacking the system and coming up with these creative solutions around how to, you know, do this stuff, because they feel like they're unfairly, you know, being monitored and whatever. So trust can be broken from the manager side, but also from the employee side, right? If there's too much trust from the manager and the employee takes advantage of it, then this also creates this weird dynamic, and essentially it leads you back into this Nash equilibrium that I was referring to earlier, where you're kind of stuck in this situation where, unfortunately, there could be a better option for both parties, but they're not pursuing it because they're uncertain of how the other party will behave. This is going

Ned Johnson:

to be a and explain, explain that for folks who don't know. So this kind of classic game theory, right? Sure. So what walk this for folk, folks who often have this haven't learned about this yet?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Sure. So let's see. Let's maybe use an example whereby you have a team lead and a director, right, a manager and a director, and the manager reports into the director. And so then there is a situation of under performance, and the manager's team, and the director suspects that there's something going wrong. And then the director tells the manager, tell me more about your team's performance. I think you're you're not pulling your your weight, right? And so then the manager has two options. They can either tell the director the truth and tell yes, you're right. We're not pulling our weight, and this is why, or they can lie and say, No, you're you're crazy. We're being blocked by another department, and it's complicated. You wouldn't understand. You're not close to the work and so but trust me, we're doing. Well, so let's go with the first option. If the manager tells the truth, then the director says, Great, thank you. Please fix it. So now it's the manager's responsibility to fix a team that's probably demotivated underperforming, and this is not a one week thing, right? This is something which can deviate a manager's career. And so it's not in the manager's best interest to actually tell the truth, because then that's risky for him or her. So what happens is, then that the manager is to some degree incentivized to obscure the truth or to lie so as to minimize the downside for him or herself. Right? If there's no no situation where I admit that my team is not performing well, then once the time comes to get promoted to director, or once the time comes to increase my my head count, I will not have that little black.on my record, which says, hey, this person had a six month period where their team wasn't really performing because of this. Even though the best situation would be to actually fix this for the company, for the director, for the manager, right? You end up getting stuck in this Nash equilibrium whereby you're doing the opposite thing because you don't know whether the director is going to support you or, on the contrary, reprimand you or kind of penalize you for this. Does that make sense?

Ned Johnson:

Yeah, it does make sense. And so, I mean, I'm, I'm, my head is spinning a little bit trying to think about kind of who makes the first move there, right? You know, trust is has to be built or earned, right? Any any thoughts on how you've seen that done well, or what, what you have done in your own work, or you've seen others have done in, you know, coming back towards you,

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

the first thing that comes to mind is that remote work means you're spending less downtime with people, you're building less human connection, and this means that you can build less trust in a remote setting when all of your engagements with a peer, with a boss, are purely kind of work driven, and you might do some chit chat at the beginning, at the end, and whatever talk about about stuff, but ultimately, you're not doing these engagements, interactions which bring you closer and build trust. And so in a remote setting, I think this is an and we see this in the day actually, that in a remote setting, there's a higher percentage of disengaged engineers, but also a higher percentage of super high performing engineers, which is super interesting, right? Yeah. I'm really was struck by that? Yeah, so maybe, maybe parking that aside, and maybe we can dip into, dig into this a bit, a bit later. That's the first thing that comes to mind, whether someone makes the first move or not, or how to best execute it. You know, it's hard to draw a conclusion or give a recommendation or use some empirical evidence to suggest something, because it's as any human interaction, it has many nuances, many small interactions. And you know, it's really hard to put your finger on kind of who has to make the first move or whatnot. But ultimately, it revolved around this whole notion of building trust. And then building trust can be done both in professional interactions and also in kind of non strictly professional interactions. And then in this setting, we do find that just being in an office, seeing a person face to face, shaking their hand, giving them a hug, whatever is appropriate in your company culture and all this stuff, right? Maybe when it's their birthday, you give them a hug or something or hug your mind every day. But all this stuff builds trust, but then, which, then, in turn, creates these effects where there's probably less silent quitters would be my, oh, that's, that's one of the

Ned Johnson:

axes, you know, my instincts run to, you know, given power dynamics that that it has to start with the person or the the thing they can go through it up most is the person Who has the kind of ability to hire a fire, right? The risk for me as a manager, to you as a director, it's a really big deal, you know, if I'm not truthful to you, you've got an underperforming, you know, team, sure, if, but, but the risk for me is like, I don't have a job, right? And I may not have a future. And so that's an interesting challenge where my head is going to as you as you may know, my work is most with parents, kids in schools, and your point about building trust is such a good one. My writing partner is a clinical neuropsychologist. We were just talking earlier today about the ways that parents can back off from their kids in order to be closer to them, as opposed to being on top of them, which they think makes them closer, but actually works against that close connection, mostly because it's conveying that I don't trust you. I don't trust you to be on top is I don't trust you to think that this matters. I don't trust you to a bit of handle situations I don't trust you'll be able to straighten out. I've got to jump in. Obviously, you can't be trusted, because this thing is a mess, so I have to come and now micromanage it, which makes a lot of kids like, okay, fine, you take care of it, right? And then all of a sudden, the arguably, the parent can find themselves doing the physics homework, or perhaps the director, you know, having to pull the all nighter to get to get that work done, because. Address the team to sort of step back a little bit. I noted from your you mentioned this before, and it was also on your LinkedIn. You didn't quite have a conventional education, at least high school education, that's correct. So tell us a little bit about this, and then I want to sort of ask questions, because I find this fascinating,

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

sure thing. So I had the both fortune and misfortune of choosing to drop out of eighth grade at age 14. It was legal. Where you were, I don't even know the rules. I were living in Spain, and this was legal. There was nothing that anyone could do to force me to go to school. I mean, I'm not super familiar with how the legal framework has changed right now, but

Ned Johnson:

in the States, we can force them to go to school, but we can't force them to pay attention or to engage. But keep going.

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

I was living in Spain. Couldn't force me to go to school, really, and I chose to drop out. I self taught myself how to code, and I started a wow business, an online business. In this case, it was a B to B, E commerce platform whereby I would sell hotel supplies to small and medium sized hotels in Spain. And the reason this had to be online was that I was 14. I couldn't talk to my customers on the phone. I couldn't meet them in person, obviously, because I was a teenager, right? If you do this online, you do this online, you have a website where the customers can log in and they have their inventory, their custom prices, and they can order these shampoos, toothpaste, toothbrushes, slippers, all this kind of stuff. Then they think it's just like a, you know, an adult running, yeah, actually me,

Ned Johnson:

wow. So I gotta So first, I'm hoping that when you travel to Spain and get like, like, wonderful, great upgrades at every hotel that you go to, for all you good you did over there, were you drawn to this world that you're creating for yourself or you? Or did you leave because you were so disengaged with what your schooling was up to that point, we drawn two or pushed away a

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

bit of both. I would say I didn't find school interesting because I would spend too much time there, think 8am to five or 6pm that's a long day. That's that's a long day. We lived far away, which meant we have to commute, and I would essentially not have any free time, time. I would spend it at school. I found it boring, too slow. But while I found it too slow, my grades weren't amazing, because I was just very disengaged and doing my own thing and getting essentially C's and B's, right, maybe on a good day. And so then, while teachers told me, Oh well, this guy is kind of smart, but his grades don't warrant to bum him up a year or put him on the accelerated program. And so that was kind of the part which pushed me away from school, right? Find an interesting you know, and whatnot. And then I was also drawn to doing something where I just found more purpose, more sense, like this whole thing of starting a business, you make money, you're making decisions, you're screwing up, you're talking like you're the first batch of supplies I bought was using my own money, basically all of it. Karen thought I was crazy, wiring money to some factoring in China, yeah. And they were like, What are you doing? They let me do it, which I'm very grateful to them. That's something too. Really did give me. It was a lot of autonomy and freedom. I love it. When I dropped out, I didn't think this was like, I didn't have a master plan. I just thought, hey, I don't like it. I'm gonna do something else. And yeah, this whole business thing seems like it's working. And so then that's kind of how things came to be.

Ned Johnson:

If you, I'm sure you've spent time off and on thinking about that time of your life in hindsight, if you What would you have suggested to the teachers, the administrators at the school, what change or changes might they have done that would have kept you in school, to make it to make it worthwhile to be there. It's very

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

hard to execute, but customizing the curriculum to every student around because they want to learn the pace at which they want to learn the depth that they want to go into. And also, I was getting graded on things like how neat I was, on my writing. I wasn't a very neat person. And that turned out to be not, not a very useful life skill, I think, because now you're hardly ever right by hand, but when

Ned Johnson:

I was you'll appreciate I don't have the the technical brain that you have, but I was better than average at math. And my family, we switched. We moved from one town to another, and lived in central Pennsylvania, and I have a twin brother. We're both. We both like math, and the school we've been at before was just what you're describing. It was individually paced, so that there they would have these little both reading and math, these little books, and you could read the concept, you can complete the things, you take little quiz, and you could go as far and as fast as you wanted to go, so long as you're, you know, proving the mastery. And so we were doing, I think, like long division in second grade, which, you know, it's not a you. Enormously sophisticated skill, but I think it was a bit ahead of where most folks were. So we switch over to this other school. And my mom talked to administrators and said, Well, you know that these guys like math, and they're pretty good at it. It probably makes sense for them to be in the advanced you know, when the more advanced classes and,

Unknown:

well, we can't just put anybody in advanced class. They gotta, they gotta show they

Ned Johnson:

can do the work. Here's where the neat thing comes down. So what we had to do is demonstrate our facility with addition. Keep in mind now we're doing long division addition, and so it was like little word problems, like so Farmer Brown has five chickens, and then he gets three chickens from his friend Igor. How many total chickens does he have? Here's here's the here's the hard part, though, you had to draw a picture, a little corral with five chickens and then three more going in there. And if I have any identifiable, if I have any artistic ability at all, it's not yet been identified. So I am just over this, like, how do I draw a chicken a corral? Oh, my goodness, right? And they were not going to put me in the math in the high level math class, because my art skills weren't was spent. And I thought my mother was going to lose her mind. You're thinking, this is not this is not good thinking.

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

I mean, I totally can see how, at least right now and for now, right until curriculums become more flexible, there is a huge opportunity, and not just the pacing, but also the topics, topics and the level of maybe around some topics, you just kind of let that person, that teen, that kid, do the bare minimum to kind of get through it and whatnot, and then you let them lean in and spend more time around the topic that they find interesting. When I got to college, I had straight A's, and I was, you know, finished number one in my cohort of four or 5000 kids. Holy every single moment of it. And I went from like A, C and B, middle school dropout, right? Eighth grade dropout, to graduating top of my class at a pretty good undergraduate program. And this was by way that the American education system, especially in college, they'd allow you to pick the classes you want, more or less, right? So I could pick and choose. Okay, do I want to do this? No, maybe not. Maybe I can do this instead, right? And this, even little flexibility, was great for me, because it made me feel like I was choosing my own journey in control, and I could, you know, study things that I would find interesting, and therefore just put a lot of effort, enthusiasm and learn

Ned Johnson:

a ton. There's a I'm tied up with a group who are trying to bring more self directed learning in ways that you're describing to public to school systems, really, at scale. And there's a book written 2016 called School of our own origin stories, a little bit complex. I'll just ignore that for now. But there's a quote from there where the authors write, and it was a, it was a kid who was in last year of high school, and his mom, who was a who's a psychologist, so we, I mean, really, really interesting folks, and they write, or the the her son writes, How can you ever expect me and my friends to learn if we aren't engaged? Yeah, and how can you expect us to be engaged if we have no authority over what we're learning?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Yeah, that's a fantastic quote. And I think parts of this can be seen in the in the very rigid schooling system that I was put through, and as soon as I got into, I mean, in retrospect, it wasn't even that flexible. I could choose maybe 30% of my classes, but, and, you know, it was like choosing between tomato and tomato, but it was flexible. Some choice matters, right? It matters a lot. And yeah. And also the the fact that grading was very transparent, that's the other thing, which, by the way, I've, I've how to word this gently, I might have had a different experience with the transparency of grading at the institution I was in after my undergrad, but that's not not go there. So my point is that, like having transparent and objective grading with a rubric with a clear cut, hey, here's what we expect, and if you want an A, here's what you're gonna have to do, right? That matters a lot, because then there's a tight feedback like the situations, which completely killed me was when I would pour my heart into an assignment, and then I would get a C and I'm like, But wait a minute. But I literally and specifically one time when we had to do something and the teacher accused me of copying something from the internet. Oh, my, a cover for a CD, a CD thing, yeah. And I spent like a download this software. I spent like hours doing this design, and it looked great, and it looked, honestly, almost professional grade. And then other kids, they would just kind of Google the picture of a whale, slap it on top of there, put a text, and they would get B's and A's. And I spent like literally two weeks doing this, and I got a C, and then that point it was like, Okay, I'm done with this. I

Ned Johnson:

Oh my. We talk about the trust, right? Boy, oh, boy, that and we're gone, right? So

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

perhaps have a high degree of trust with that teacher. And he thought, hey, this person is usually disengaged. How is it that now he's producing this amazing work? He must have copied it from somewhere. So things like that just completely killed

Ned Johnson:

it for me. And, you know, and the interesting thing about the. I think of the work that my writing partner and I do talk about the importance for young people, or any of us, for having a sense of control. And that point about a transparent grading rubric. I had never thought about it, but that really does give you, as a learner, me, as a learner, a sense of control. If I want this outcome, here's what I need to do, right? So the objective is clear, absolutely.

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

And then also, if the student perhaps goes above and beyond, but slightly deviates from the rubric, but you can see that the intention of the student was to push this even further and took it in a more interesting, more maybe slightly crazy direction. You should reward kids for doing that, not Oh, well, you you know, and the rubric says this, and you kind of strayed away from it, and, you know, you can deduct, like, one point, or whatever, like, like, a nominal amount, right, right, right, you know, for maybe instilling the notion of, Hey, you can't just do whatever you want in life, like you have to. And I also abide by some rules, and if you don't, we have expectations. Yeah. Something else I wanted to bring up is that I have a brother. He is exactly three years older than me. He went through the exact same education system as I did. Unfortunately, the education system wasn't super great for him either. He, you know, he finished high school, but he has a very different personality than my own, and it's important to understand the child's the teen's temperament as you tailor these curriculums, these approaches, it's not just what someone what someone wants to learn, it's also how they want to learn. It what they want to do. How do they learn best? Morning, afternoon, evening, by doing, by listening, by a bit of both, right? And here's where we get into situations where you can have 20, 3050, kids in a class, and all of them have different permutations of this combination of one is more technical, but likes to learn by reading. The other one is more technical, but likes to learn by doing. So. How do you accommodate? How do you reap the benefits of having kids in a classroom, or they're interacting across genders and all this stuff and building these social skills while also delivering a customized curriculum to each one of them that will allow them to kind of, yeah, essentially, flourish as individuals in whichever direction they want, and they're the best suited for

Ned Johnson:

when the thing that occurs to me a lot of times, when folks can hear that educators, parents, you know, and said that makes great sense, but then their brains sort of explode with the imagined pandemonium, and, goodness knows, I'm a worry a teacher or professor, and I'm sure that'll never happen, but that's okay, you know, with 30 or plus kids and they there's no, there's no way Igor. I mean, there's if it's not, if it's not structured and rigid, how could I possibly do this? Right? But going back to a point you made before, sometimes folks think it's going to be slippery slope, right, and we have to give up everything we have the inmates running the asylum. But a point that you made before is it doesn't have to be everything. It just has to be not nothing, right? And so if one out of every three assignments you know, you can do a cover art for a CD, I can do a podcast, someone else can do a paper, whatever. And just just those small moments of choice and autonomy and control makes such a difference. Again. This is the this research that came out of Brookings. The last person I interviewed is an educator of Southeast Ohio, and this is a very traditional public school, and they created what they call flex Fridays, and it was the whole day, half the day, something like that, where folks can do basically whatever we want. You can do coding, I'll do, you know, you know, learn the weld. Someone else is doing poetry, whatever, whatever, and it's basically self directed and self chosen. And both the topic and the method, as you note, and it made an enormous difference in in addressing the dropout rate in the school you know, school avoidance and you know, and attendance issues that you know they kept trying to so many schools want to just keep increasing the penalties on children and parents, if the if your kid doesn't show up, here's what, here's something even worth is going to happen. And all that they did is turn it around and say, Look, anyone can do this. And you know, anyone can do this. The deal is, though, you can't skip Monday through Thursday and show up for five you have to be here the other days of the week. And because when kids crazy idea, when kids had something to look forward to in their school week, they now had a reason to want to go to school during the school week, right? Yeah,

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

exactly. I'm super in favor of such approaches. I don't have the right answer around how to, you know, incorporate more flexibility in elementary, middle, high school curriculum, but I do know that some flexibility is required. I know that with AI, you're not going to be able to just understand how good a kid is at learning a subject. You're going to understand their temperament as well, their personality almost. And education is going to be so flexible. And personalized that it's going to be interesting to see. You know, how schools adapt to this, while also not pushing towards a model where a kid just sits in a room with an iPad and does their own thing and then never interacts with with other people, right? Because that's, I mean, you need to socialize kids with one another, have them interact and do all this stuff, because that becomes super, super critical later on in life. And I mean, essentially, humans are made to have relationships on our tribal and all this, right, right?

Ned Johnson:

And they may bring us all the way back to where it started, with the colleagues who, you know, the ghost engineers, who was the lack, you know, the lack of connection, or the lack of feeling that their work was meaningful, and with the folks who are the managers, the directors or their colleagues, absolutely, I want to end with the very last line in this article. We'll put this in the show notes. I just I adored this. And this again about you know how you said, my mission isn't to find these people, meaning ghost engineers. My mission isn't to find these people. My mission is to understand why this phenomenon occurs and make it not occur.

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So the research gained a lot of attention because we were the first group to quantify the percentage of southern quitters or ghost engineers in a, you know, almost longitudinal, cross sectional across companies, type of a type of way, and that's how it's gained prominence. But the goal of the research isn't to like, we're not the Ghostbusters, right?

Ned Johnson:

I love that. Sorry, keep going. That's fantastic. We

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

are essentially maybe quite the opposite, right? Where, yeah. And to understand something, you first need to quantify it, because if the phenomenon doesn't occur very frequently, then why would you spend your energy in your career looking to improve this? Right? And so what we're kind of trying to approach this from the other end, okay, we've we know that a certain percentage of people are ghost engineers. They're selling quitters. Let's dig deep. Let's dig into why. Let's dig into how we can use, in this case, data to find them, to help them and to prevent this from happening. I don't believe that humans are inherently evil, with a very pointed few pointed exceptions, but then they do get into these weird Nash equilibriums, where the behavior they are exhibiting is, you know, tends to be on the on the malicious side. And so then what this means is that, hey, we can, there's things we can do to engage these folks, to give them meaningful careers that are appropriately compensated, where their their work is adding value to the world, to society, to humanity. They're improving whatever thing they're working on, and it's a happier situation for the company, because the company is doing better for the teams and for the individual. The thing is that it all starts from identifying and talking about the problem and acknowledging it exists. Next it continues with finding the reasons around why exists and if this exists. And I think we've touched on a few of them. Few of them, and this starts to get into so as research, as it gets closer and closer to humans, you get more and more guardrails from different ethics review boards. So there's less and less things we can do there. When we look at it on a macro level, it's easier to kind of draw conclusions that we can start interacting with people and digging into their particular situation. So I think there's going to be a bit of a, maybe a slightly harder challenge there around addressing it. But ultimately, the end goal is to, yes, essentially eradicate this phenomenon of ghost engineer, and have every software engineer be fully engaged, happy, earning a wage that is, you know, very much connected to their productivity, to their output. And you know whereby all of the parties involved are are in a situation where they're just engaged, happy, producing their or reaping the most out of the respective situations.

Ned Johnson:

What I love about this and is just thinking about how much what you just said applies beautifully to school and children as well. We want to find them, we want to help them, and we want to help them figure out how they're going to contribute to humanity. Absolutely, it's kind of like the human, you know, objective, right? How do I contribute to this world?

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

And you never know how much a kid is going to contribute to humanity when they're a kid, right? There's you have to enable these, these folks, to reach their potential, whatever that will be. And I think that perhaps also for for kids, there is this whole notion around, you know, pushing statistics around how good our kids are in the average SAT and the average GPA and and the drop powered rate, and there's this incentive to maybe, like, perhaps slightly obscure, or, you know, massage those numbers for the benefit of the school or the school district, or the country, even, or whatever it is, right? But at some point you're like, well, wouldn't we benefit more from acknowledging that, hey, there's things. Our education system around the kind of primary, secondary basis that can be improved. Here's the impact. And instead of just kind of throwing it under the carpet and pretending it doesn't exist, let's sit down talk about it, address it in a way that benefits society, humanity. These these kids that will go on to do fantastic things in whatever they choose to do, right? So funny how similar effects and dynamics happen workplace as well as in schools, right? There's

Ned Johnson:

Carlos in there. I love it well. Igor, thank you so much for being a guest and sharing with us your your thinking on this. I will be curious to see my brain is going to whether or how the work that you're doing could be brought into school systems as well. And to your point, not to out these folks, but to find them and figure out, how do we help them? Because we, you know, we sure as heck want to make a good use of Team brains and tuition and tax dollars to get the most out of you know, how we, how we're spending our most precious treasure, you know, the our time

Yegor Denisov-blanch:

Absolutely. Matt Miff, you know looking forward to continuing doing research in this space, and if there's any areas where I think there can be some insights that can be cross pollinated, I'll make sure to share them with you and your audience. I would really appreciate that. Awesome. Thanks again. Thanks for having me on the podcast, Ned. Goodbye.

Ned Johnson:

Hey folks, Ned here. Over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school age students who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. It can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill sticks root reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website@prepmatters.com or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person, if so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350