4 ms·

It's not nefarious, it's a pattern of a particular company trying to game a metric, to boost their reputation. Pretend you were a dev, and your effectiveness w

It's not nefarious, it's a pattern of a particular company trying to game a metric, to boost their reputation. Pretend you were a dev, and your effectiveness was mostly described within your 500-engineer department in terms of "how many pull-requests" you merged each month. In the abstract, that seems like a reasonable metric to use - it does seem to correlate with actual output, and encourages smaller slicing (which is generally positive). But two years down the line, you find this one guy, consistently in the top 10 rankings, and you feel like he's just not accomplishing that much, so you start looking into his actual workstream. And you find that he does do normal work, but he produces 10 times as many 1-5 line PRs as the average, each of them adjusting some bit of copy or changing an error message. For the better! And his QA isn't bothered, because his work is very easy to verify. But he's not actually one of the most effective devs in the company, and it's really irritating that his process-games (a) seem to work (the VP of engineering definitely knows him as a 'high output engineer') and (b) impose some unnecessary load on other bits of the company's process (like the QAs and burning CI credits). That's the emotion in play here. "Stop wasting our time, we can see what you're doing."

roenxi 5y ago
This looks boring. This is a scene that plays out in every company weekly. The stakes are trivial, there is no evidence of ill intent anywhere. Nobody has done anything particularly badly behaved. Nothing here is a shining example of good behaviour. There isn't a feel-good aspect. I suppose the question is, who are the 100+ people who upvoted this, and why?
- nevinera 5y ago
  I agree, I've no idea why it would be at the top of HN. Maybe China-hate?
  - dbsmith83 5y ago
    Hate is a strong word. Dismissing it as simply 'hate' is emotive language (and dishonest, I think) in that it tries to guide the reader to the conclusion that it is completely unreasonable. A more honest word to use would be 'mistrust'
    - nevinera 5y ago
      "Hate" is a word that has a variety of meanings, and I was using it as a suffix - it's basically a synonym for '-aggro', a way to describing a pattern of oppositional or antagonistic behavior. (My usage is colloquial. If I were saying what you have mistakenly read it to mean, I would have mentioned hatred of China", or maybe "China hatred".) I am not using it "dishonestly", and I think that the conclusion it guides people to is completely reasonable and accurate - we should dismiss the majority of opinions that take the form "yup, that's just like China" or "China is doing this shit again? what a surprise." The behaviors of individual workers in a system where they're being incentivized improperly don't have anything to do with China's current geo-political actions, and I get tired of so many people acting like 'China' (or 'the GOP' or 'California') is a single coherent entity with self-consistent behavior at all scales.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - dbsmith83 5y ago
        You're right, I read the phrase a little too literally. Apologies!
- dbsmith83 5y ago
  It was good clickbait. The title made me think something similar to the recent security issue with the University of Minnesota[1] was happening again, but from Huawei this time [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670

roenxi 5y ago

This looks boring. This is a scene that plays out in every company weekly. The stakes are trivial, there is no evidence of ill intent anywhere. Nobody has done anything particularly badly behaved. Nothing here is a shining example of good behaviour. There isn't a feel-good aspect. I suppose the question is, who are the 100+ people who upvoted this, and why?

nevinera 5y ago
I agree, I've no idea why it would be at the top of HN. Maybe China-hate?
- dbsmith83 5y ago
  Hate is a strong word. Dismissing it as simply 'hate' is emotive language (and dishonest, I think) in that it tries to guide the reader to the conclusion that it is completely unreasonable. A more honest word to use would be 'mistrust'
  - nevinera 5y ago
    "Hate" is a word that has a variety of meanings, and I was using it as a suffix - it's basically a synonym for '-aggro', a way to describing a pattern of oppositional or antagonistic behavior. (My usage is colloquial. If I were saying what you have mistakenly read it to mean, I would have mentioned hatred of China", or maybe "China hatred".) I am not using it "dishonestly", and I think that the conclusion it guides people to is completely reasonable and accurate - we should dismiss the majority of opinions that take the form "yup, that's just like China" or "China is doing this shit again? what a surprise." The behaviors of individual workers in a system where they're being incentivized improperly don't have anything to do with China's current geo-political actions, and I get tired of so many people acting like 'China' (or 'the GOP' or 'California') is a single coherent entity with self-consistent behavior at all scales.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dbsmith83 5y ago
      You're right, I read the phrase a little too literally. Apologies!
dbsmith83 5y ago
It was good clickbait. The title made me think something similar to the recent security issue with the University of Minnesota[1] was happening again, but from Huawei this time [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887670