Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
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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?
#2Not to take away from the premise offered in the article ...
But is there a selection bias here? Some kinds of work invariably involve more github activity, small fixes and the like. Those things are generally, unambiguously 'productive' and 'leave the code better', which lends us to believe 'top performers'. Surely, this might be true but I think within a specific context.
If find solving new or novel problems involves a lot of work that is hacky, experiemental, quick trial, often the kinds of things that in most cases don't even get checked in.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#3I don't disagree this could be true and the reasoning (makes sense)™ but it would be nice to have some hard data when making such assertions.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#4Not to take away from the premise offered in the article ... But is there a selection bias here? Some kinds of work invariably involve more github activity, small fixes and the like. Those things are generally, unambiguously 'productive' and 'leave the code better', which lends us to believe 'top performers'. Surely, this might be true but I think within a specific context. If find solving new or novel problems invol…
By such a metric people who write the final implementation on the first commit are complete slackers.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#5In the olden days they used to measure performance by SLOC, Source Lines of Code.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#6Lol, when I worked at a unicorn one of my buddies got an award for "most testing code commits"
He confided after drinks it was because he didn't know how to squash/amend his commits.
So I'm not so sure about that metric....
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#7I’m somewhat self conscious about the sheer volume of commits that I make. The reason there are so many is that I want each atomic unit to be distinguishable.
Part of that is motivated by the will to save often in case something goes wrong. Part is to let continuous integration validate with high granularity. Part is to allow for binary search on revision history to reproduce rare bugs and isolate the specific change which introduced it.
These considerations may explain the correlation with “top performing” - although for what it’s worth I try to make commits which remove more lines of code than they add whenever possible.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#8Not to take away from the premise offered in the article ... But is there a selection bias here? Some kinds of work invariably involve more github activity, small fixes and the like. Those things are generally, unambiguously 'productive' and 'leave the code better', which lends us to believe 'top performers'. Surely, this might be true but I think within a specific context. If find solving new or novel problems invol…
Why not? Doing experimental things that might not work out, or need radical revisions, is exactly when VCS helps the most.
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#9Being 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 factors suggest that it's hard to split cause and effect here. Being seen as productive increases change count :)
Re: Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
#10In the olden days they used to measure performance by SLOC, Source Lines of Code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code
Which reminds me of this story:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...