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

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

#131

Post by temac »

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.…

OTOH I'm tired of people who don't "have the time or knowledge to complete [their ideas]".

Ideas are cheap. Show me the code.

Asking, explicitly or implicitly, for others to "implement/finish" their ideas is easy. I would even call never finishing / polishing anything very disrespectful: I'm not (should not be) here to cleanup after "talented" individuals. This is detrimental to my own "ideas."

So at least, if not anything else, I better be recognized for the boring and tedious maintainership work I do and that talented people with their "ideas" refuse to perform...

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

#132

Post by seahawks78 »

jyriand wrote: post #126
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".

Since this comment was downvoted let me elaborate this with a personal experience (of course it is anecdotal).

In June of this year, my entire team was struggling after moving to a new Kafka cluster because of low throughout in one of the backend services (about 250k/min with approx 32 instances). This was causing issues for our downstream dependencies as we were not able to reply back within one hour of consuming the record from upstream and our L2 support was daily getting numerous pages which were also escalating to us. Then my manager asked me to take a look at what is going on and if we can improve the throughput somehow. After almost spending one week of banging my head against different theories and tons of experiments in QA I finally figured out that the new Kafka client we were using had a setting where it required acks from all brokers (which has increased to 5 in the new cluster from 3 in previous one) and this caused a huge increase in the blocking time even though we were using an Async framework. The async task just waited too long for completion and once completed could not get the threadpool back due competition with other threads. Solution: simple, I just changed the Kafka producer ack from "ALL" to "ONE" requiring acknowledgement from one broker only. Throughput with same 32 instance jumped from 250k/min to around 700k.

I ask the intelligent readers of HN - do you think that based on this I should be penalized since the change was only in one line of config code? Yes, that's all what it took to resolve this outstanding issue - one line of config change/one commit albeit one week of thinking and experimenting time!

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

#133

Post by rendall »

m_rpn wrote: post #56

I hope that someday this "version control craze" will end, this perpetual race where everybody is urging to fire PRs to up his stauts in the team, this sensation that before being a good engineer you have to know git dark arts to the core, in order to rewrite "HISTORY", and amend each misdoing as you see fit. We need to remember what is our job: writing software that makes sense, not commiting code.

I don't get this. Version control is essential. I've worked at places that didn't have it and it's absurdly unnecessarily unpleasant.

If you really don't like git try Mercurial. I haven't worked with it in years but it was very easy to work with

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

#134

Post by jeffreyrogers »

nrmitchi wrote: post #115
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #110

Top 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.

> Top performers do more work (generally, not always). Yes, that is true by definition. What is not necessarily true is that all of that work involves writing code. > generally people capable of writing more code faster are also capable of writing the right code I disagree here though, and is highly dependent on what you consider to be "the right code". In my experience the people capable of writing more code faster…

Maybe, but I see speed as a proxy for ability. If all I know about someone is they can write code fast then I would bet on them being an above average programmer.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

mumblemumble wrote: post #89

I suspect that it's nearly impossible to separate one's definition of a top performing developer from some sense of how often they commit. For better for for worse. I've worked on teams where I had colleagues who were incredibly deliberative. They would spend lots of time working with stakeholders to deeply understand their problems, and then produce elegant solutions that made their jobs drastically easier. Small ch…

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by dathinab »

One important point missed:

- Top performers tend to be motivated.

- Just because someone is a "top performer" in one project/team/company doesn't mean this person will be one in another project/team/company. Reasons can be manifold, motivation can play a big role between someone being a good and someone being a top performer.

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

#137

Post by rendall »

seahawks78 wrote: post #132
jyriand wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Since this comment was downvoted let me elaborate this with a personal experience (of course it is anecdotal). In June of this year, my entire team was struggling after moving to a new Kafka cluster because of low throughout in one of the backend services (about 250k/min with approx 32 instances). This was causing issues for our downstream dependencies as we were not able to reply back within one hour of consuming th…

Agreed that your week of combing through the settings to get that kind of increase was well worth the time, and it would not be fair to measure your productivity by number of commits

I think you are getting downvoted because of your comment "utter piece of crap" as against the guidelines

I suggest you edit that post and take it out

Your observation, stripped of negativity and emotionalism, would probably be up voted!

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

#138

Post by aeyes »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #27

Perhaps some of the more productive workers are the ones that don't hesitate to make necessary code changes, test the changes adequately, and then move on to the next thing. I have noticed that pretty much every software engineer to some degree has problems that they procrastinate on. Folk can spend 10x more time talking about doing something than it takes to do it. For hard problems, that discussion is necessary and…

> Folk can spend 10x more time talking about doing something than it takes to do it

When I see this happening in the team, I immediately try to get the engineers to implement 90% to then talk about the other missing 10%. There are a million reasons why a solution isn't perfect and we need to put as much thought into it as possible. At the same time we have to keep in mind that everything we do is a tradeoff. If you think your solution is perfect you probably lack knowledge.

I prefer to ship 90% and then see how we can improve on that with data I can't produce if I don't ship anything. Talk about hypothetical future problems going in circles doesn't solve problems we have right now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those 10x thought times guy myself. But I know how to keep the ball rolling in a team and take the responsibility for these types of decisions which look like educated corner cutting.

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

#139

Post by cryptica »

daxfohl wrote: post #75
cryptica wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the 'most' premise as well. Totally a false signal. In my view, the opposite is true. The top performers tend to commit less. People who are genuinely passionate about coding don't tend to put that much effort into the more pedantic aspects of the process; they're more focused on big ideas such as the structurally important parts of the architecture. The developers who make a lot of commits are often…

My experience is the same as the author's. If one defines top performer as you did, those who are "more focused on big ideas such as the structurally important parts of the architecture", and you run the numbers, you'll find most of these people will also be outliers in commit count. This is true in just about every team I've worked in. And it makes sense too. The person who best understands the design would be the f…

If you have to work on a very complex project, you need to plan the architecture at a high level or else it will be a disaster. I've seen the code-as-you-go approach fail miserably over and over.

Try coding a decentralized P2P system where multiple instances of the same code running on many different kinds of machines communicates with itself in a scalable and DoS-resistant way. There is no way anyone can implement this properly without careful architecture planning. You would never get it right the first time unless you plan and analyze all the main use cases carefully.

Or try to design a distributed pub/sub system or message queue with automatic sharding across the cluster. Also needs a lot of planning. You can't just code along and hope to get it right.

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

#140

Post by username90 »

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…

What if every commit has to be reviewed by a certified code reviewer before it is accepted? That is how Google does it. Means you can't skip tests etc. Not sure why not more organizations do it, like wouldn't banks etc benefit a lot from it?
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