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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?

#141

Post by seahawks78 »

rendall wrote: post #137
seahawks78 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Thanks. Updated the main reply.

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

#142

Post by specialist »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #108

There'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 no…

Paraphrasing:

Josh has the initiative, forcing John to react.

--

In my experience, Josh is a firehose of chaos, doesn't test their own work, colors outside the lines. So in addition to John reviewing Josh's torrent of bs, John is always playing catchup, always has to do more rework.

Further, it's not a balanced relationship. Josh creates urgency to fast track approval for their own PRs. Then will goal tend John's work. Pedantry over everything. Let PRs get stale, so John has to remerge, reseting the whole process. Insist the commits are "too big", "hard to understand", and therefore need to be broken up.

Etc.

Individual agility and velocity are evil, rewards dysfunctional behavior.

If the whole team isn't committed to getting the whole team across the finish line, it's not a proper team.

PS- Additional dysfunction if John is constitutionally incapable of refactoring, removing dead code, and other good citizenry.

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

#143

Post by that_guy_iain »

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…

> 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, sloppy, riddled with issues and a nightmare to maintain. And it would inevitably fall upon us "lesser" performers to actually investigate and fix all those issues, making us look less productive in the process.

This is one of the most common complaints I hear about fast devs, is the produce lots of bugs. But what I've seen is fast dev produces 5x more code than normal devs and produces 5x more bugs. Which means the ratio is the same but it feels different because they're producing so much more code. You then get the devs who say they have to spend lots of time investigating these bugs so look worse. But I've literally seen the fast dev go on to a bug that one of the other developers was spending 2 weeks investigating and find the issue in the data within 5 minutes. You then have the slow and careful devs who will write 5 functional tests, 1 unit test and add 10 seconds to the build (not much but it adds up when it's ever issue) and still have the same ratio of bugs as the guy who is doing 1 units tests.

I think the realitity is, a good dev is someone who produces the most business value. And something lots of devs don't want to hear is that the tiny little tweaks they make to improve the code quality, adds very little business value. Where as a required feature that works 90% of the time adds lots of business value. I think a lot of the complaining about these rockstar devs is just jealously. Code quality is one of the smallest tech problems yet so many devs think it's super important. No, getting stuff delivered so other departments and customers can do things is. Being able to plan things out is super important. Having a good data model is super important.

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

#144

Post by ram_rar »

Top performers are motivated and do more work. But that does not necessarily translate into real progress. If you shit the bed and clean it up, its not real progress. Unfortunately, management doesnt see that way.

I wont consider myself a top performer. But I have my moments of glory. Most of my impactful commits were deleting unwanted code and needless libraries in the codebase.

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

#145

Post by JoeAltmaier »

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…

In my experience, its the sloppy Engineers that create problems that get the most credit. They are called upon to be 'heros' again and again, to fix their crap they shipped with 1000 issues.

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

#147

Post by yellowbeard »

hkt wrote: post #94
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…

Maybe a proxy for good contributions is the lifespan of their contributions rather than frequency?

I think this can also be problematic. Long lived code _must_ work, which is good. However, it can also live a long time for bad reasons. I have seen long lived code that only lives a long time because it is so complicated that no one can understand how it works, or written in a way that is very hard to change. So it lives a long time, because no one wants to take the time or effort to touch it. Finally, when it _must_ be changed to support a new feature, it might require a full rewrite.

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

#148

Post by jfengel »

rednum wrote: post #113
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 worry about sanitizing inputs--extra effort slows you down. I feel like many people downplay how important this is. I've wasted way too much time because of this. Doing code archeology to understand why data persisted to database many years ago breaks some seemingly unrelated feature for a customer is definitely not my favourite part of the job. Working on a validator that someone was "too busy to add" in the…

Oh, lord. I don't usually have to think about sanitizing data coming from my own database, but of course any long-running database can have all sorts of crap in it. What a nightmare.

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

#149

Post by tracyhenry »

username90 wrote: post #140
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…

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?

Wonder to what extent that solves the problem. Quite often your code reviewer's interest/world view aligns with yours: "Right we need to ship this feature asap so let's worry about tests later" or "More commits boost your performance review so these 50 1-liner commits I get it."

It reminds me of a similar problem in academia: the LPU (Least Publishable Unit) phenomenon where people tend to break a work into multiple smaller pieces to get more paper counts. It's so widespread that lots of paper reviewers are doing them too. So you don't get punished.

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

#150

Post by indymike »

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 differentiates highly productive developers is their ability to ship more complete functionality from the same input as other developers. Inputs can be tickets, requirements, or even notes from a meeting. Commits and pull requests are production steps, but don't tell the whole story - they do give you some level of indication.
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