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“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

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Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#211

Post by andrey_utkin »

Tainnor wrote: post #177
dtech wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have a (semi-objective) target without a metric.

What you want to measure and what you actually can measure are usually very distinct things, that's where "operationalization" comes in. You have a target that you can't measure directly, hence you measure a proxy. That only works for as long as people don't game it and aim for the proxy instead of the actual target. Also, in addition, at least in research every statistician worth their salt knows that their proxy is…

IMHO to not be gamed, management needs to operate on a conceptual level which is similarly sophisticated, or surpasses in sophistication, the conceptual level of the employees (or suppliers).

If there's a single KPI and all the reward is tied to that without any balance, sure that will be gamed.

But if there is a well-defined, appropriately complex reward function aligned with the utility of whatever the organization delivers to the outer world, I would consider that a positive.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#213

Post by bellyfullofbac »

belter wrote: post #95
epage wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save English speakers a couple of clicks to translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=zh-CN&u=http...

Keep in mind this community is probably censored: https://qz.com/1063073/in-china-you-now-have-to-provide-your... From the online translation, the mention by one the commentators that the Kernel Maintainer is also Chinese...give me a bit of a chill... To make it clear ...Not that I would not trust the maintainer, instead, my concern is that depending where he is based a window could be open to unpleasant pressure...

BTW, mentioning his origins probably has something to do with "saving face", it was probably more embarassing to the Chinese patch submitter to have been criticized by another Chinese person compared to a Westerner, since in Asia the mentality of "we're from the same country, we'll look out for each other, and one of us shouldn't be making another look bad in public." is more pevalent.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#214

Post by _d7dt »

ertian wrote: post #207
otikik wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the email was completely effective in denouncing a behavior. Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). Linux health happened *despite* Linus' manners, not because of them.

As others have pointed out, that's speculation. I have trouble understanding why it bothers people so much that Linus is rude sometimes. You don't have to interact with him if you don't want. You can even contribute to the kernel without interacting with him. Whatever he's been doing has been working for going on 3 decades now, I don't see a burning need to change it because it bothers some outsiders. There's this we…

The main problem for me is the old "fish rots from the head down" effect -- when the rude and entitled behavior comes directly from the top, it's no surprise when everyone else starts acting like that and gets at each other's throats. It should be obvious by now where this weird sense of entitlement and refusal to understand other people's culture is coming from.

>feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see

Most Linux distros are basically already doing this. They all have their own patchsets. It's well beyond correctness and hygiene at this point, if you actually look at the changes that are being disputed, it already falls a lot more in the "cultural differences" category.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#215

Post by geofft »

wyager wrote: post #135
lmilcin wrote: post #38

I have worked in team with some kernel developers at Samsung, years ago, so let me put some perspective for those who do not understand the dynamics. In some companies, the amount of patents or Linux kernel patches you get accepted is direct measure of your success. As you know, whatever you measure becomes a target -- these guys feel very pressed to get ANY kernel commits accepted, no matter how small, irrelevant or…

This is why ousting Linus puts the long-term health of the kernel at risk. It’s very difficult and expensive, at a personal and professional level, to tell colleagues to “fuck off” if they are submitting low quality garbage for reasons related to their salary. Linux was Linus’s baby, he had nearly absolute control, and he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off…

Good theory, but it's factually wrong. "Maintainers" in this context doesn't refer to Linus personally, it refers to individual maintainers of parts of the kernel. You can check the kernel MAINTAINERS file, and note that such a file has been there for years.

There has been a longstanding problem of people submitting low-quality patches to maintainers - not to Linus personally - and that problem predated Linus stepping back for one release.

Linus was not ousted and continues to have nearly absolute control; he has, for decades, chosen to exercise that control by delegating ownership of parts of the code to other people. Those people receive and review patches and incorporate them into their repos, which Linus pulls in bulk. (This is the origin of the term "pull request," which predates GitHub's use of it.) He quickly reviews those patches to make sure there's nothing weird, but he generally trusts that his "lieutenants" are making good decisions.

That means that the time being wasted here is the time of individual maintainers, who are reviewing the patch, making a full judgment on it, and pulling it into their tree. Linus sees all such cleanups once per cycle and looks at them fairly quickly.

Almost all of those maintainers have been "normal employees" of various companies for many, many years. Again, take a look at the MAINTAINERS file.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#216

Post by jldugger »

radiator wrote: post #107
lmilcin wrote: post #38

I have worked in team with some kernel developers at Samsung, years ago, so let me put some perspective for those who do not understand the dynamics. In some companies, the amount of patents or Linux kernel patches you get accepted is direct measure of your success. As you know, whatever you measure becomes a target -- these guys feel very pressed to get ANY kernel commits accepted, no matter how small, irrelevant or…

Maybe a panel of maintainers could publish a quarterly review with attribution/thanks to the most important contributors. No metrics to game, only pure human expert opinions.

IMO part of the problem is that Greg KH publishes this annual 'state of the kernel' that is just a list of metrics to game. Which feels like it was started to shame non-RH companies to contribute more often. So, kinda maybe beware what you wish for?

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIQr2-Dh0es

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#217

Post by Ericson2314 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #174
shkkmo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would indicate that the issue is not using KPIs to understand how your business is performing, but providing incentives based on KPIs.

This is trite. Just about any way of understanding something is going to create perverse incentives. Keeping the metrics secret has other problems too. I don't think there is a a good solution. Maybe with radically shortened work hours and less pay disparity, the strives can strive off the job instead.

Actually I'm being silly, there is a good solution: Workplace Democracy. You can fool the higher ups come promotion time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.

Mondragon please get in the tech biz.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#218

Post by gxnxcxcx »

theli0nheart wrote: post #157
da39a3ee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people make trivial typo PRs on my open source projects I say thanks very much, close their PR, and make the change in a commit under my name. This way, if their interest is in improving the project then it worked. And if their interest is in contributions then it works also because it doesn't pollute their contribution history with trivial changes that aren't real contributions.

That’s incredibly disrespectful. With that approach, I would be shocked if anyone would want to contribute to your project again after such behavior.

Maybe it's easy to feel it's disrespectful because they've made social networks out of contributing to repositories.

Accreditation for the modification of petty and trivial issues is a nice and decent gesture, but overall unworthy of a paper trail binding me to any random none-of-my-business project for such a drive-by PR.

Personally, I would feel more comfortable sending that kind of inane PRs if the parent's way of merging was the standard one, but I know it isn't and therefore opt to keep separate accounts to compartmentalize (which unfortunately increases friction to such contributions).

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#219

Post by ghaff »

Tainnor wrote: post #177
dtech wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have a (semi-objective) target without a metric.

What you want to measure and what you actually can measure are usually very distinct things, that's where "operationalization" comes in. You have a target that you can't measure directly, hence you measure a proxy. That only works for as long as people don't game it and aim for the proxy instead of the actual target. Also, in addition, at least in research every statistician worth their salt knows that their proxy is…

As someone who is periodically involved with this sort of thing, the challenge is that far and away the easiest things to objectively measure are almost always output metrics: commits, blog posts, external presentations at conferences, etc.

Output metrics chosen correctly also tend to represent things that the team/person has a reasonable degree of control over. For example, a developer KPI probably shouldn't be number of new customers because that's something they have vanishingly little control over, especially at an individual level.

The problem is that those things that a number of different teams are contributing to are probably the thing that the company cares about.

Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

#220

Post by croes »

Clewza313 wrote: post #137
lmilcin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KPIs are not a shit system, they are actually important to running any nontrivial organization. The issue isn't whether KPIs are good or bad but what you do with them. KPIs don't need to be tied to actual people, usually they are tied to teams, systems, projects, processes, etc. For example, a number of users resigning from our services might be a KPI. KPIs are an important tool to understand what is going on and whe…

Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Humans are extremely good at gaming KPIs, and will do so as long as they're rewarded for it.

Rather Marilyn Strathern's rephrasing.

The original quote is

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

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