I was a top performer on my team in the past for a couple years. It was nice being an expert, but they never promoted me and were always playing games. I think it's better just be a average or below average person and not have to deal with the BS that comes with being a top performer. At this point in my career I doubt I'll ever make it back to that level of skill anyways.
Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
101–110 of 194 posts
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> praised by management for the amount of work they produced Management literally can't tell the difference, sometimes even if it is a former dev. There are many ways to ship code faster. -Don't test -Don't worry about sanitizing inputs--extra effort slows you down. -Optimize for writing, not maintaining -Take a tech-debt loan. Bolt your feature somewhere convenient it doesn't belong. -Put on blinders. Your n+1 query…
> -Don't test In an environment that rewards commits, unit tests can be a source of many little commits.
Tests are fiddly to get working and could expose problems! Maybe in a new commit and PR later?
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
> -Don't test In an environment that rewards commits, unit tests can be a source of many little commits.
Tests are fiddly to get working and could expose problems! Maybe in a new commit and PR later?
Plus tests are so slow to run, booooooring. How can you get anything done if you're staring at red text all day?
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#104The thing to note here is that this is a one-way correlation: top performers tend to produce lots of commits. That does not mean that people who produce a high amount of commits are the top performers in your company. I've had to deal with plenty of colleagues who moved very fast, committed extremely often, and were praised by management for the amount of work they produced. But in reality their work was rushed, slop…
Maybe a proxy for good contributions is the lifespan of their contributions rather than frequency?
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3386321
Check out pages 71:26 and 71:27 for "Codebase introduction and retention" between Clojure and Scala. I'd like to see more graphics like these to illustrate "lifespan of commits"
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#105The thing to note here is that this is a one-way correlation: top performers tend to produce lots of commits. That does not mean that people who produce a high amount of commits are the top performers in your company. I've had to deal with plenty of colleagues who moved very fast, committed extremely often, and were praised by management for the amount of work they produced. But in reality their work was rushed, slop…
Most problems are multi causal and if you have blame culture will degenerate into a litany of finger pointing.
There is "blame culture", where every problem turns into a witch hunt, and there is the opposite, call it "anti-blame culture" where no problem can be declared, because, well, it's never the only problem to solve, and thus can never be solved.
Competitive entities nearly never fall victim of the anti-blame kind, but where there is little competition, they are just as common as their opposite.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#106If you look at it from a slightly different viewpoint, there's nothing remotely surprising or controversial about this. You wouldn't be surprised to hear that the best factory workers tend to produce the most widgets per hour, or that the best butchers process the most meat per hour. Productive output is definitely highly correlated with job skill, almost tautologically so. Yes, a code commit isn't exactly the same thing as a widget, but it's similar enough in broad strokes to still be a useful measurement.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#107For me at least. I am the most productive when I can do many SMALL commits and able to push them to prod.
You have to be able to make your change; either a refactoring or a functionality change and get it through the QA, review, deploy process. Now days I spent a lot of time, dealing with multiple branches and deployment environments and my productivity is in the floor. In a previous job I was able to deploy 2 or 3 changes a day in prod. It was very full filling.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#108There's a pretty subtle pitfall that teams can fall into here.
Let's say a team has 2 developers. Josh is 20% "better" than the John, or simply started earlier and has more context on the code base. So initially, Josh is 20% faster, but now John has to spend an extra 20% of his time reviewing Josh's code in a pull request (or understanding Josh's code so he can make a change) instead of making forward progress. So now, actually John is even 20% less effective than he can be, and he has less time to actually code. And since he's even less productive, Josh has __more__ time to code, so he's even faster, which means he writes more code. It kind of compounds, and even an initial slight advantage in speed or context for one developer can amplify itself over time.
A good engineering manager or senior engineer can detect when that's happening and try to correct the balance. But often the team kind of settles into a mode where Josh is known to be better and more productive and everything is funneled to him.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#109In the olden days they used to measure performance by SLOC, Source Lines of Code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code
I read that most enterprise software developers write about 3k sloc per year on huge projects, in terms of final code add size (not lines added), but that it varies quite a bit. Has anyone ever found these sorts of metrics to be helpful in their experience? Wouldn’t be any good for individual performance but what about for projects as a whole?
Code size is a great indicator of the complexity of some software and how much work it will be to maintain it. It is also a reasonably good, but far from perfect indicator of how much work went on building it.
That measure is also one of the arguments for highly expressive languages, because developers seem to produce approximately the same length of code whatever language they use. And leads to some very good questions about why that length changes a lot from one place to another, but doesn't change much when one changes the more development-centric options (like the language or editor/IDE).
But, of course, if you start ranking people based on it, it will stop being a good predictor of anything.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#110Top performers do more work (generally, not always). This is contrary to the HN conventional wisdom that lines of code are a bad metric, and I see where those people are coming from. But generally people capable of writing more code faster are also capable of writing the right code.