GitHub Insights • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Insights

#21

Post by onecup » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

mgoblu3 wrote: post #3

Is this what they did with the PullPanda acquisition? We had started using that a bit, but not being able to add new users as of late and the general pause in feature development seemed like something else was up.

They also acquired Gitalytics which hasn't been announced yet. Insights seems to be a hybrid of the two - Gitalytics/PullPanda.

Re: GitHub Insights

#22

Post by swagonomixxx » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #16

aupright wrote: post #7

For those worried about the data being used maliciously, it looks like most of the metrics they'll be introducing are focused around things that can actually help unblock teams and aren't focused on individual contributors. Eg. distribution of code reviews across team members for better load balancing, average code review turnaround times across the team. It also looks like you'll be able to proactively set goals for…

Nope, fuck this. The moment a product mentions "From developer to CEO" (ie. includes the word "CEO"), this is bad news. As soon as you introduce any metrics involving "participation awards" (whether based on lines of code, commits, reviews/pull-requests, etc.), the company is doomed to fail at understanding how productivity/worth is measured in the development world. The fact they even mention "CEO" in their tagline…

I'm inclining on agreeing. Gaming commit counts and commit graphs on GitHub is already a thing. I've been asked by many recruiters why my commit graph on GitHub has gone stale, when I've worked at places that don't use GitHub, or if my commits are 99% of the time towards private repositories.

I can already see the resumes of developers touting their statistical brilliance from metrics gained from this tool. It's not a world I want to be a part of, to be honest.

Re: GitHub Insights

#23

Post by onecup » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:17 PM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #16

aupright wrote: post #7

For those worried about the data being used maliciously, it looks like most of the metrics they'll be introducing are focused around things that can actually help unblock teams and aren't focused on individual contributors. Eg. distribution of code reviews across team members for better load balancing, average code review turnaround times across the team. It also looks like you'll be able to proactively set goals for…

Nope, fuck this. The moment a product mentions "From developer to CEO" (ie. includes the word "CEO"), this is bad news. As soon as you introduce any metrics involving "participation awards" (whether based on lines of code, commits, reviews/pull-requests, etc.), the company is doomed to fail at understanding how productivity/worth is measured in the development world. The fact they even mention "CEO" in their tagline…

Stack ranking at it's finest.

Re: GitHub Insights

#24

Post by vasco » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:18 PM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #16

aupright wrote: post #7

For those worried about the data being used maliciously, it looks like most of the metrics they'll be introducing are focused around things that can actually help unblock teams and aren't focused on individual contributors. Eg. distribution of code reviews across team members for better load balancing, average code review turnaround times across the team. It also looks like you'll be able to proactively set goals for…

Nope, fuck this. The moment a product mentions "From developer to CEO" (ie. includes the word "CEO"), this is bad news. As soon as you introduce any metrics involving "participation awards" (whether based on lines of code, commits, reviews/pull-requests, etc.), the company is doomed to fail at understanding how productivity/worth is measured in the development world. The fact they even mention "CEO" in their tagline…

If I were a CEO of a technical company and my company did a major change, say switching release strategies or adopted microservices vs monolith, these type of global metrics could indicate the benefits, or a problem. I agree that drilling down on individual people or trying to optimise blindly is the wrong move, but I think you're taking too much of a negative view on this. Shitty people will use more powerful tools for their shitty purposes, but that doesn't mean we should keep our tooling crappy.

Re: GitHub Insights

#25

Post by glram » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

Ah I was hoping based on the headline that this would be some sort of analysis of the actual code -- aka a pie graph of the different language features each team member uses. Kinda like an aggregated `blame` :D

Re: GitHub Insights

#26

Post by williamdclt » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

nimish wrote: post #13

Yuck, when metrics become a target they cease to be useful.

But metrics are useful, which is what this is.

Devs complain about exec picking irrelevant metrics to evaluate them (and they're right), but what I see even more often is teams full of inefficiencies that like being a black box and don't want to make an effort to introspect and self-improve. Often they're barely teams, they are just a collection of devs working on the same thing

I'm happy this tool exist and I'm sure my team will be better off because of it.

Re: GitHub Insights

#27

Post by tilolebo » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #16

aupright wrote: post #7

For those worried about the data being used maliciously, it looks like most of the metrics they'll be introducing are focused around things that can actually help unblock teams and aren't focused on individual contributors. Eg. distribution of code reviews across team members for better load balancing, average code review turnaround times across the team. It also looks like you'll be able to proactively set goals for…

Nope, fuck this. The moment a product mentions "From developer to CEO" (ie. includes the word "CEO"), this is bad news. As soon as you introduce any metrics involving "participation awards" (whether based on lines of code, commits, reviews/pull-requests, etc.), the company is doomed to fail at understanding how productivity/worth is measured in the development world. The fact they even mention "CEO" in their tagline…

I mean,the feature is part of GitHub One, which itself seems to be a premium version of GitHub Enterprise.

They gotta find a reason compelling to executives for the crazy costs.

Re: GitHub Insights

#28

Post by majormajor » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #16

aupright wrote: post #7

For those worried about the data being used maliciously, it looks like most of the metrics they'll be introducing are focused around things that can actually help unblock teams and aren't focused on individual contributors. Eg. distribution of code reviews across team members for better load balancing, average code review turnaround times across the team. It also looks like you'll be able to proactively set goals for…

Nope, fuck this. The moment a product mentions "From developer to CEO" (ie. includes the word "CEO"), this is bad news. As soon as you introduce any metrics involving "participation awards" (whether based on lines of code, commits, reviews/pull-requests, etc.), the company is doomed to fail at understanding how productivity/worth is measured in the development world. The fact they even mention "CEO" in their tagline…

Most metrics measuring code are bad.

However, we have to try to come up with some. The idea that if you simply take away the metrics we will automatically improve the product is flawed.

Consider rewrites that burn a year of time for dubious value. Or fancy "refactors" that are really big heavy redesigns that lock you into abstractions that don't make sense in six months. Or devs that open 2000-line after 2000-line pull request...

At that point, code metrics aren't just about performance management, it's about me wanting to make sure I'm actually moving the code in the right direction.

Something I'm very interested in is if dev commit patterns line up with different types of work, and if some of those are "behavior smells" - e.g., not refactoring things one at a time, and getting your tests happy in between each move.

Re: GitHub Insights

#29

Post by sytse » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

For people who want to compare GitHub Insights to GitLab please consider looking at GitLab Insights https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/insights/ Code Review Analytics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/code_review_analyt... DevOps Score https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/instance_statistics/dev_ops_... and Value Stream analytics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/value_stream_analy... and a few others listed in https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/05/06/git-challenge/

Re: GitHub Insights

#30

Post by _jal » Wed, May 06, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

developer2 wrote: post #16

aupright wrote: post #7

For those worried about the data being used maliciously, it looks like most of the metrics they'll be introducing are focused around things that can actually help unblock teams and aren't focused on individual contributors. Eg. distribution of code reviews across team members for better load balancing, average code review turnaround times across the team. It also looks like you'll be able to proactively set goals for…

Nope, fuck this. The moment a product mentions "From developer to CEO" (ie. includes the word "CEO"), this is bad news. As soon as you introduce any metrics involving "participation awards" (whether based on lines of code, commits, reviews/pull-requests, etc.), the company is doomed to fail at understanding how productivity/worth is measured in the development world. The fact they even mention "CEO" in their tagline…

As a profession, developers are likely more responsible for imposing mechanical, inhuman metrics and instrumentation on society than anyone since double-entry accounting was invented.

Everything from upvotes/likes/internet points to in-house fraud detection to click tracking to Captchas to facial recognition and tracking... Of course programmers are going to emit signals that those signing checks are going to take interest in.

I recommend you learn to live with it, everyone else has to.