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

swecareer.substack.com

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

#61

Post by cryptica »

atraac wrote: post #58
cryptica wrote: post #46

Wow, the premise of this article is very wrong; it's deeply concerning that people are falling for this. Those who make a lot of commits are not top performers, they are mostly engineers who are overly concerned with their 'optics'; they are engineers who are good at projecting themselves as 'top performers' but if you actually look at the results of their work a few years down the line, you will see that they are in…

That's why there's 'most' in the title. Noone here assumes that more commits = better, but the article simply points out a correlation that MOST top performers, tend to have most git activity, and I see a similar thing in my professional experience. That doesn't mean I think that anyone with a lot of PR reviews or commits is better than other people...

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 more concerned with optics and they will argue for hours over unimportant tedium while sometimes missing the big very important ideas (the ones which will have real impact and flow-on effects for years to come). Basically they can't tell the distinction between what is important and what is not. They can't tell apart bureaucracy from value creation. Obsessive focus on commit size and other tedium is a key signal that someone doesn't know what is really important. They tend to be conventional thinkers (driven by peer pressure and peer approval) and their idea of productivity is distorted by false consensus (like the one this article attempts to instigate).

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

#62

Post by cryptica »

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…

I think this points depends heavily on the complexity of the project. If the project is very complex (e.g. P2P, blockchain, distributed messaging, machine learning, ...) then you actually want engineers to think really hard about every line of code they write.

The best, most long-lasting code I ever wrote took a long time to write. Sometimes I have to think about a single small feature for multiple days before I begin to implement. Some foundational structural technical decisions require weeks of thinking and analyzing. It's the best way to guarantee that you don't have to come back to rewrite the code later.

When I was younger, I would refactor some of the foundation logic every few months as I added more changes on top. These days I almost never refactor the foundations. That extra time is totally worth it. It's very hard to come up with a good design.

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

#63

Post by Mauricebranagh »

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.

"version control craze" !

Really! version control is one of the big improvements to software development I have seen.

Now if we could get the rest of the customer chain to start version controlling their requirement docs and properly minuting meetings and action points

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

#65

Post by onorton »

xycodex wrote: post #47
Uehreka wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that why people are always saying you should squash commits? To help with collecting metrics?! I view it as a clear antipattern (since the history within a branch can be valuable later if you need to cherry-pick apart a feature or find a bug with git-bisect) and have asked superiors in numerous places why they require it, and the response is usually a vague mention of “it cleans things up” and “history isn’t impor…

It might depend on the CI process. If the CI is only run on the tip of the branch being merged, then the PR should squashed, otherwise if a rollback it required, it would be possible to rollback to a commit that was not tested by CI. Unless there is a list of 'known good commits' somewhere.

Don't most systems have a merge commit for the PR? I know TFS/Azure DevOps does.

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

#66

Post by diogenesjunior »

vii wrote: post #9

Being considered the go-to person means you are first in line to make small tweaks (and config changes in code). This increases the change count. If there is a review process where another engineer has to approve work, this exacerbates the gap, as the go-to person can get their reviews done quickly. If they're trusted, the reviews might not be thorough. This increases the rate at which changes go in. These and other…

With GitHub's API, commits are so easy to game. I'd never use commits as a measure of how good of a programmer someone is. I made a Python script in 15 minutes to commit to a repo every second, and the repo is sitting at about 750,000 commits.

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

#67

Post by sys_64738 »

codegladiator wrote: post #30
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…

I worked as a contractor with some companies and peer coded with their engineers. What I found was that its not just procrastination. Many folks are just afraid to commit code, like literally scared and I could never get a real reason for that. At one point I added some code based on the direction what requirements were taking. But I could not convince him to commit it. So we finally agreed to let it be there comment…

Commented out code is a terrible idea. It is the reason you look at source code and see it filled with garbage. When you have a developer who has no confidence in their code then you ask the usual question about requirements, testing, code review, etc. If it's still not committed then there's clearly a developer issue to workout with management.

When a developer fails to follow through on their tasks and takes extra time then this increases the budget of a project.

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

#68

Post by geek_at »

diogenesjunior wrote: post #66
vii wrote: post #9

Being considered the go-to person means you are first in line to make small tweaks (and config changes in code). This increases the change count. If there is a review process where another engineer has to approve work, this exacerbates the gap, as the go-to person can get their reviews done quickly. If they're trusted, the reviews might not be thorough. This increases the rate at which changes go in. These and other…

With GitHub's API, commits are so easy to game. I'd never use commits as a measure of how good of a programmer someone is. I made a Python script in 15 minutes to commit to a repo every second, and the repo is sitting at about 750,000 commits.

are you the guy hosting that "time as a service" github repo? Where the time is always updated and you can curl the json or whatever and get the time?

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

#69

Post by pwdisswordfish0 »

The problem lies in the question. In the worst circumstances, it's indicating survivorship bias, and in the best circumstances the only truths it reveals are tautological. Using number of commits to measure productivity is the new version of thinking that the more number of lines of code that a programmer writes, the better.

Not that this will stop a segment of the industry from flushing a non-trivial amount of resources down the drain learning this lesson, and inevitably leaving a chunk of stalwarts who never really learn anything. It was clear that was going to happen when the "social coding" site that everyone was flocking to put so much emphasis on activity measured in number of commits, forks, and other administrative details. Things which were only any good for advertising the site's own user engagement in its pre-IPO/-acquisition phase, and too many people mistaking it as a measurement of something else.

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

#70

Post by diogenesjunior »

geek_at wrote: post #68
diogenesjunior wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With GitHub's API, commits are so easy to game. I'd never use commits as a measure of how good of a programmer someone is. I made a Python script in 15 minutes to commit to a repo every second, and the repo is sitting at about 750,000 commits.

are you the guy hosting that "time as a service" github repo? Where the time is always updated and you can curl the json or whatever and get the time?

Nope, not at all. Do you have any links to what you're talking about?
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