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GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

cli.github.com

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Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#41

Post by figmert »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

While I agree, I personally always opt out if I'm aware, and hate it when a tool suddenly gets telemetry, I don't think Git is comparable, same with Linux.

Linux and Git are fully open source, and have big companies contribute to it. If a company like Google, Microsoft etc need a feature, they can usually afford to hire someone and develop _and_ maintain this feature.

Something like gh is the opposite. It's maintained by a singular organisation, the team maintaining this has a finite resources. I don't think it's much to ask for understand what features are being used, what errors might come up, etc.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#42

Post by a2128 »

j_maffe wrote: post #18
a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction? I'm not sure if you're implying it's obvious but it's not obvious to me that it would be unhelpful.

Just anecdotally, I get the feeling telemetry often does more harm than good, because it's too easy to misinterpret or lie with statistics. There needs to be proper statistical methodology and biases need to be considered, but this doesn't always happen. Maybe a contrived example, but someone wants to show high impact on their next performance review? Implement the new feature in such a way that everyone easily misclicks it, then show the extremely high engagement as demonstration that their work is a huge success. For Git, I'm not sure it would be widely adopted today if the development process was mainly telemetry-driven rather than Torvalds developing it based solely on his expertise and intuition.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#44

Post by hansmayer »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users

Unfortunately this is due to a large part of "decision makers" being non-technical folks, not being able to understand how the tools is actually used, as they don't use such tools themselves. So some product manager "responsible" for development tooling needs this sort of stuff to be able to perform in their job, just as some clueless product manager in the e-commerce absolutely has to overload your frontend with scripts tracking your behaviour, also to be able to perform in their job. Of course the question remains, why do those jobs exist in the first place, as the engineers were perfectly capable of designing interaction with their users before the VCs imposed the unfortunate paradigm of a deeply non-technical person somehow leading the design and development of highly technical products...So here we are, sharing our data with them, because how else will Joe collect their PM paycheck, in between prompting the AI for his slides and various "very important" meetings...

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#45

Post by charcircuit »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

Git notoriously has had performance issues and did not scale and has had a horrible user interface. Both of these problems can be measured using telemetry and improvements can be measured once telemetry is in place.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#46

Post by gordonhart »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

The impact of a few more network calls and decreased privacy is basically never felt by users beyond this abstract "they're spying on me" realization. The impact of this telemetry for a product development team is material.

Not saying that telemetry more valuable than privacy, just that it's a straightforward decision for a company to make when real benefits are only counterbalanced by abstract privacy concerns. This is why it's so universally applied across apps and tools developed commercially.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#47

Post by cerved »

mghackerlady wrote: post #25

can someone explain why github has a CLI? why wouldn't you just use git?

You use gh to interact with the forge, git to interact with the repo.

For example

  gh pr checks --watch
will run and poll the CI checks of a PR and exit 0 once they all pass

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#48

Post by dale_glass »

a2128 wrote: post #14

Why we collect telemetry ...our team needs visibility into how features are being used in practice. We use this data to prioritize our work and evaluate whether features are meeting real user needs. I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices? Git has served us well for 20+ years without detailed analytics…

> I'm curious why corporate development teams always feel the need to spy on their users? Is it not sufficient to employ good engineering and design practices?

No, because users have different needs and thoughts from the developers. And because sometimes it's hard to get good feedback from people. Maybe everyone loves the concept of feature X, but then never uses it in practice for some reason. Or a given feature has a vocal fan base that won't actually translate to sales/real usage.

> Would Git have been significantly better if it had collected telemetry, or would the data not have just been a distraction?

I think yes, because git famously has a terrible UI, and any amount of telemetry would quickly tell you people fumble around a lot at first.

I imagine that in an alternate world, a git with telemetry would have come out with a less confusing UI because somebody would have looked at the stats and for instance have added "git restore" right from the very start, because "git checkout -- foo.txt" is an absolutely unintuitive command.

Re: GitHub CLI now collects pseudoanonymous telemetry

#50

Post by dfc »

kevincox wrote: post #39
embedding-shape wrote: post #2

Love it when a PR is brief: https://github.com/cli/cli/pull/13254 > Removes the env var that gates telemetry, so it will be on by default.

Not only on by default, it also isn't possible to disable it seems. It's forced on (other than enterprise it seems)

There is a "How to opt out" section in TFA.
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