This same sort of thing is killing stackoverflow haha.
“Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
231–240 of 277 posts
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What’s the Deal with Huawei’s Ownership?" https://sayari.com/resources/huaweis-ownership-opaque-unusua... "Huawei claims to be owned entirely by its employees, but verifying this claim is a tricky proposition...However, comparing Huawei to other Chinese corporations reveals that Huawei’s ownership is highly unusual." .... "Using Chinese corporate data, we determined that Huawei’s ownership structure is very uncommon…
The article I linked to explains the origins of Huawei's ownership structure. It made sense when it was set up decades ago, though it's not the way that a company would be set up now. Yes, it may be unusual for a company this size to be set up this way, but there are very few companies of this size anyways. There does not appear to be anything nefarious about the use of the labor union committee as a vehicle for empl…
Not really:
"Who Controls Huawei?" https://www.ui.se/globalassets/butiken/ui-paper/2020/ui-pape...
"Technical dependency and the issue of party-state control over Huawei"
"...While at first glance Huawei’s line of defence appears convincing, there are also reasons for doubt. It is true that the company is privately owned by its employees, but there is reason to believe that ownership does not come with control..."
"...Huawei has not only profited from party-state support, but is operating in a specific political, legal and economic environment that makes it impossible for the company to be fully independent..."
"....The widespread distinction between privately owned enterprises (POEs) and state ownership is not decisive in China. It is not ownership but the issue of “state capture”that is pivotal... "
"...Following an official request, Huawei has confirmed to the author of this paper that party organisations exist within the company in accordance with Chinese law. The company has provided assurances that party organisations have no influence on the company’s business operations and that it is run by an independent management team. The party organisations are mainly responsible for educating employees. The general findings on the deep linkages between the economic and political elites, however, call into question whether such differentiation is adequate in the context of China’s political economy..."
"...China lacks an independent judiciary. While theCCP government speaks of strengthening the role of law in its governance, it follows a rule by law principle and does not intend to implement the rule of law. The CCP has an essentially instrumentalist understanding of law. Law is seen not as a constraint on power, but as a means of power. This means that legal certainty does not exist in areas of crucial political importance. Hence, laws do not provide reassurance against political interference in the business operations of Chinese companies..."
"...China’s Intelligence Law,raise even further doubts about whether the law could shield private sector companies from political interference. Article 7 of the Intelligence Law enacted in 2017 and amended in 2018 requires any organisation and citizen to “support, assist in and cooperate in national intelligence work”..."
"...Scepticism over Huawei’s independence from party-state control does not just stem from the political, legal and economic environment in which it operates....Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, is widely believed to have a past in China’s People’s Liberation Army. His daughter and the company’s Chief Financial Officer, Meng Wanzhou, is suspected to have held a public affairs passport.... A widely discussed and controversial analysis of the CVs of leading Huawei engineers found a large overlap with China’s security apparatus..."
"...This clearly demonstrates that the main control over Huawei does not lie with the employees of the company, who can only choose 83 people from a preselected list of 109 candidates, but with the nomination teams that hand-pick these people using vague criteria. Whoever wants to control Huawei needs to control the nomination teams. There are no adequate checks in place to ensure that it is not the Chinese Communist Party and its organisations within the company that are the ones exercising such control...."
"...What sparks further suspicion of the process is that none of the Huawei employees I have talked to was aware of the nomination process, even though it turns out that real power of selection lies with the nomination teams..."
"...In the light of these four factors – the general level of independence of the POEs, the legal environment and Intelligence Law, state support for Huawei and the company’s governance structure – it is very difficult to reject the claims of Huawei critics that the company is more than just a privately run company striving for economic profit..."
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#233Earlier 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.
> Linux health happened despite Linus' manners, not because of them. I don't care. Telling incompetent people to fuck off is cool AF.
Maybe that's a sign that you are an incompetent team member and communicator.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Their younger versions might not have agreed with it, but some people do mellow out in their old age. In this case, to me it's clear that he is doing a large turnaround, which validates Wyager's statement that he did not care too much before.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Their younger versions might not have agreed with it, but some people do mellow out in their old age. In this case, to me it's clear that he is doing a large turnaround, which validates Wyager's statement that he did not care too much before.
I'm not sure what that means, or what basis there is for any of it ? The basis for my comment was Torvalds' own statements and actions, and he's a pretty good source for Torvalds and for effective management and communication in the Linux community. Do you know him personally? Are you a maintainer?
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article I linked to explains the origins of Huawei's ownership structure. It made sense when it was set up decades ago, though it's not the way that a company would be set up now. Yes, it may be unusual for a company this size to be set up this way, but there are very few companies of this size anyways. There does not appear to be anything nefarious about the use of the labor union committee as a vehicle for empl…
Not really: "Who Controls Huawei?" https://www.ui.se/globalassets/butiken/ui-paper/2020/ui-pape... "Technical dependency and the issue of party-state control over Huawei" "...While at first glance Huawei’s line of defence appears convincing, there are also reasons for doubt. It is true that the company is privately owned by its employees, but there is reason to believe that ownership does not come with control..." ".…
Not really what?
The article you linked acknowledges the legal reasons that Huawei's employee share ownership was set up the way it was (limits on the number of individuals that private Chinese companies were legally allowed to distribute stares to). Most of the concerns the author has with Huawei are really just general concerns about any company in China - namely that the state theoretically could exert influence over them.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Could you please show some real-world examples of this practice?
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
KPI = Key Performance Indicator. It's basically a list of things that are considered during your evaluation. The more items off that check list you cross (if they're one-time items, like "ensure an uptime of X"), or the more of each you do (if they're things like "upstream patches" or "patents granted"), the better your score is. It's a shit system that does exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do IMHO, but…
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…
Measuring things is important, but turning them into a target is a disaster. The term KPI is generally used when the measure is a target.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#239Is there anything going on here that suggests this is not a routine maintenance issue? The Kernel maintainers have a lot of people who want to submit code to the kernel, and have to maintain standards. I'd imagine there are a lot of emails like this one. Good on Huawei if they are incentivising open source contributions. Shame on them if they are wasting OSS maintainer time. Presumably well done Qu for promoting some…
The point is that if you were serious about fixing the spelling stuff, you'd put it into a single patch and not break it apart.
The fact that all these fixes are in separate patches means that its being used to game a Key Performance Indicator.
Re: “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
#240Earlier 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.
Um, what? The degree to which a metric is directly tied to incentives absolutely impacts how much that metric will be gamed. It is not trite at all to caution that metrics that are critical to understanding your business should remain as decoupled as possible from incentives. This allows you to maintain the quality of the signals your metrics provide.
This isn't just theory. This is precisely why there are laws that prohibit rewarding people based on how they voted.