I'm a software engineer with 2 year experience at a single company and one of my job responsibilities is to merge code from one stream to another (we use AccuRev). Each stream represents a version of our product, a desktop application, with child streams representing future versions of the product. Development occurs across all streams and each stream is built every night for testing on the following day. In order to prevent build errors from unresolved conflicts when code flows down from a stream to its child stream, each stream is time locked and each day I unlock a stream, allowing changes from a parent stream to flow down, and merge all conflicts that occur.
After browsing Hacker News for sometime and reading articles such as (Successfully Merging the Work of 1000+ Developers)[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21584144], I've recently started arguing to my manager that one person should not be responsible for merging everybody else's code downstream. And this is where my ignorance shines. I've known about Bors-NG before I started working and after seeing posts similar to one mentioned above, I was under the impression that most companies would not have a person or a group of people that dedicate part of their time to merge all change to a different stream/branch/repo/destination. However, my manager has told me that having a dedicated merger is not uncommon.
Is this really the case? Is it normal to have one person merge everybody else's changes?