Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#121

Post by booleandilemma » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #84

ndepoel wrote: post #72

The 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…

> 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 forget to not waste time on documentation!

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#122

Post by msoad » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

This is inline with my experience as well. I know it is the common wisdom to not measure performance with lines of code or number of commits. But in a large picture it's always the top performers that make the most commits.

If I was a manager and asked to lay off X percent of the engineers, I would totally take into account number of commits among other signals.

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#123

Post by zimbatm » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

Once you are the top-committer in a project, you have the advantage. You know most of the code, even if it doesn't have tests. It's easy to figure out where reported bugs are, that you have introduced. Meanwhile, the rest of the team is busy reviewing your code and rebasing their PRs.

I have seen this pattern so many times. It'a a good strategy to be recognized by management.

Also what happens when the top-committer leaves, suddenly the rest of the team can breath and flourish.

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#124

Post by seahawks78 » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

Could not disagree more. The article's main argument is wrong and dangerous to an extent! A software engineer's productivity depends on the quality of his thinking that goes on between his two ears - not on the number of lines of code (LOC), number of commits and some other meaningless measure. I don't think the author knows/understands what it takes to operate at a Senior/Staff level and beyond. Yeah, may be for someone just out of school productivity can be measured in terms of lines of code. OTOH, if a Principle Engineer in the team comes to me and says that he feels great just because he added 500 commits/30k lines of new code to the code base I will just say one thing: "run for your life"! as soon as possible.

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#125

Post by modernlearner » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

notacoward wrote: post #76

OP mentions three things: staging their work, velocity, and sense of agency/ownership. All three are problematic. Often those who have worked with a component the longest and/or wrote significant parts of it become its maintainers, either formally or de facto. As a maintainer (I've been one myself) it's simply easier to get commits in, not necessarily because you're better at the work but because of the role itself.…

It does sound from the article as if incumbents will always have a huge advantage and will be more likely to be labeled top performers.

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#126

Post by jyriand » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

seahawks78 wrote: post #124

Could not disagree more. The article's main argument is wrong and dangerous to an extent! A software engineer's productivity depends on the quality of his thinking that goes on between his two ears - not on the number of lines of code (LOC), number of commits and some other meaningless measure. I don't think the author knows/understands what it takes to operate at a Senior/Staff level and beyond. Yeah, may be for som…

It's not really constructive to start your comment with a "utter piece of crap".

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#127

Post by toyg » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

booleandilemma wrote: post #121

ericb wrote: post #84

Earlier 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 forget to not waste time on documentation!

Everybody knows code self-documents by definition. /s

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#128

Post by rendall » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

emerged wrote: post #7

I’m somewhat self conscious about the sheer volume of commits that I make. The reason there are so many is that I want each atomic unit to be distinguishable. Part of that is motivated by the will to save often in case something goes wrong. Part is to let continuous integration validate with high granularity. Part is to allow for binary search on revision history to reproduce rare bugs and isolate the specific change…

Same. I got self conscious when a co-worker mentioned it once, but at my most productive I commit when I complete a unit of thought, usually at a pace of 3-10 commits per hour.

Edit: I do think the considered criticisms of this piece are valid, especially the idea that when a correlated measurement (e.g LOC) of a thing (e.g productivity) becomes rewarded, it blows that correlation as everyone starts optimizing the measurement rather than for that thing itself.

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#129

Post by onorton » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #102

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #99

Earlier 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?

They're not fiddly if you do assertion-free testing

Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?

#130

Post by rendall » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 5:48 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #101

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 not?