Re:Show HN: GitHub Commit Visualiser
by danielvaughn on Thursday August 11, 2022 @09:48AM
(#32425498)
At my last company, we tried to measure productivity. It's a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole. You might see a single commit with 2 lines of code after a week of no activity, and those 2 lines might have legitimately taken an entire week.
Re:Show HN: GitHub Commit Visualiser
by thisisjofrank on Thursday August 11, 2022 @09:37AM
(#32425348)
This was really a throw away comment about unseen work, the real point is that its a nice visualisation of your team's activity for a period. Often bug fixes or tech debt can go unseen by the rest of the company, but this is a nice way to see what's been touched. Rather than an indication of quantity over quality.
That's a good point, but I guess for non-tech people activity => work and no activity => no work, so at that level it illustrates reasonably well, no?
This is just Goodhart's Law in action.
> activity => work and no activity => no work
Measuring activity, where by "activity" we mean "commits", means that a person who mentors other people, reviews thousands of lines of other people's code, and discusses that code in depth during long hours of meetings, does completely no work. I think you can see where such a measure can lead to.
> It shows just how much work an engineering team, or even an individual does, that often goes unseen by non-dev teams.
I can sometimes produce a flurry of small and insignificant commits, or spend weeks to produce just one. Frequency or volume of commits probably is a better measure of how organized a person is, and how predictable their task is, than the amount of work they’ve performed. It might be a better measure than lines of code, but I don’t know that it’s meaningfully better.