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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”

#221

Post by falcor84 »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #125
jart wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone ELI5 to me what KPI even stands for? Does that mean like they're like the shock troopers of open source?

KPI = Key Performance Indicator = "thing we decided is important for us to measure and increase" As such exactly what it is, will depend on company/industry/market/team/project/etc. It may be revenue or units sold or widgets made or turnover or customer satisfaction or days without accident etc. In principle, it communicates to teams what is important to business and helps everybody focus and sync.... with usual real…

>thing we decided is important for us to measure and increase

This is a great explanation, and I just wanted to nitpick that for some KPI's (e.g. percentage of defective components, or latency), you would aim to "decrease" the KPI, and in some rare instances, you'd want to keep the KPI within a range (e.g. resource utilization, or inventory size, when you want a predefined amount of buffer).

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

#222

Post by mustacheemperor »

tut-urut-utut wrote: post #9

I see that these "cleanup" patches are not bringing much value, bust I also don't see why fixing spelling mistakes or log messages is considered as harmful, KPI boosting or not. The maintainer even said if someone else sent those patches it would be OK, but not if Huawei employees do it. If they distrust Huawei so much, why not just ban them from committing, the same way they did recently with university "security re…

The dialog between the author of this message the responses on the mailing list add some clarity. There's nothing inherently wrong with providing cleanup fixes to this kind of project, but submitting those as individual merge requests instead of one grouped patch is just serving to increment the developer's "number of patches submitted" KPI at the expense of the time spent by maintainers reviewing every individual patch.

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

#223

Post by Y_Y »

_d7dt wrote: post #214
ertian wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the kernel developers got on pretty well for all those years and managed to put a pretty good product together, despite the big rotten head. And Linux distro maintain patchsets, but they're against mainline, that's a very salient difference here. They still start from whatever upstream publishes, they're not so upset by swearwords that they took a snapshot at Linux 2.4 and only add their own code on top of that.

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

#224

Post by thih9 »

croes wrote: post #162
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…

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Corollary: "Businesses that base their growth on A/B testing only, turn into gambling or pornography".

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

#225

Post by strbean »

travisgriggs wrote: post #136
dharmaturtle wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saving someone a click > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

And ironically, earned 3 points of HN karma kreds for this very tiny contribution to the discussion. Oh the deep irony in this particular context of KPI spamming.

HN posts/karma are probably going to come up in his next performance review!

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

#226

Post by zxzax »

Y_Y wrote: post #223
_d7dt wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the kernel developers got on pretty well for all those years and managed to put a pretty good product together, despite the big rotten head. And Linux distro maintain patchsets, but they're against mainline, that's a very salient difference here. They still start from whatever upstream publishes, they're not so upset by swearwords that they took a snapshot at Linux 2.4 and only add their own code on top of th…

The point there is, while some negative attitudes may not be preventing other projects from using the code, they do prevent the project from growing, and it leads to fragmentation, which I believe they are seeking to minimize. So something has to give.

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

#227

Post by NAR8789 »

jart wrote: post #115
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…

Could someone ELI5 to me what KPI even stands for? Does that mean like they're like the shock troopers of open source?

TIL what ELI5 means

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

#228

Post by sudhirj »

jart wrote: post #115
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…

Could someone ELI5 to me what KPI even stands for? Does that mean like they're like the shock troopers of open source?

Oh god no. It means their managers evaluate them on that metric. In this case, the company has set targets on how many Linux kernel patches employees should land.

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

#229

Post by Y_Y »

zxzax wrote: post #226
Y_Y wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the kernel developers got on pretty well for all those years and managed to put a pretty good product together, despite the big rotten head. And Linux distro maintain patchsets, but they're against mainline, that's a very salient difference here. They still start from whatever upstream publishes, they're not so upset by swearwords that they took a snapshot at Linux 2.4 and only add their own code on top of th…

The point there is, while some negative attitudes may not be preventing other projects from using the code, they do prevent the project from growing, and it leads to fragmentation, which I believe they are seeking to minimize. So something has to give.

That's fair and I don't disagree. Personally I never tell anyone to fuck off, but humility prevents me from assuming Linus is wrong for doing it.

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

#230

Post by wolverine876 »

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…

> he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off garbage patch requests from motivated corporate peons.

Linus disagrees with you, so strongly that he invested a great amount of his time, reputation, and political capital in changing his behavior and that of his organization.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698

I think I'll trust Linus on that. Linux seems pretty successful.

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