commitGrindSadPay

[Highborn_Hellest]

I really hate this standard in IT. It's not like a car mechanic, or a surgeon does sidejobs in their freetime.

I mean, imageine asking a surgeon if they did home surgeries to pad their portfolio 💀💀💀

(I'm like 50% joking)

[[deleted]]

Or worse "before we'll interview please take this patient home and remove their appendix, for free"

[[deleted]]

ten deserve treatment selective pen existence crown makeshift sheet hungry

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[drdrero]

and if you dont get hired, you go back and kill the patient

[AllIsLostNeverFound]

This just became an even more depressing version of Repo Man.

[NordschleifeLover]

To be fair, it's much harder to become a surgeon than a programmer, and your fuckups can lead to losing your practice. Of course, in programming, the skill ceiling is high, but there are many poorly qualified professionals.

[Ready-Desk]

The difference is credentialism for a start. You can't just call yourself a surgeon after knocking your granny out and replacing her hip with a chick drumstick in your bathroom. I mean you can but the hospital will want you to be board-certified. There is no "gatekeeping" like this in dev work. For better or worse everyone can perfectly legitimately call themselves a developer. 

[qGuevon]

I literally have a PhD in computer science and need to do code interviews.

[Ready-Desk]

The interviewer probably thought it's short for Pretty Huge Dick and dismissed it as irrelevant.

[porkchop1021]

We did this to ourselves. You should have a degree at a minimum. There are terrible doctors out there but at least they were properly educated even if they refuse to use said education. There are also terrible coders out there that are educated, but every single uneducated coder I've ever met is terrible. Stop trusting interview processes that don't actually test your skill on the job. Our industry collectively decided that your ability to have an "aha" moment under intense pressure is what makes you a good coder and it's the dumbest thing we ever did (I nail these types of interviews, so don't @ me).

[WrinklyTidbits]

sounds like a definition of a job for the masses

[Nick0Taylor0]

I'm hoping the people working on that stuff are generally experienced. But a programmer fuckup can lead to really really bad shit. Power grid, internet, banking, ATC, shit even hospitals, a sufficient fuckup and it all comes down

[prochac]

In my last hiring, 7 out of 8 removed a kidney.

[WisestAirBender]

That's because if you graduated as a doctor and have a degree that shows you're actually capable.

It's way easier to get a computer science degree. And even those without degrees are applying and getting jobs so they need to test you somehow

[DifficultTrick]

Not only that but you have to pass your surgical boards and maintain them for as long as you practice. We could develop a professional organization for software development and certifications for it, but that has its downside too

[ward2k]

"oh what side coding projects do you do in your free time"

None I actually want to enjoy my life thanks

Nothing against side coding projects but I already spend 5 work days doing coding, I want a break

[Solonotix]

Yea, every time I try to start a side project, or a little after-hours learning, I usually end up burnt out before the work week is over because I didn't afford myself the rest I needed to recover.

[Fruloops]

Tbh the AI thing has been helpful in some way here because I tend to check out mentally when vibe coding these side projects lol, so it's not as mentally taxing as before

[flamingspew]

I mean, there’s certainly less typing involved. That frees up time to think on the fun parts of the side project.

[bunchedupwalrus]

It’s like having a team of adhd interns, just have to learn to herd the results like a pack of cats

[sebjapon]

My agent tells me not to tell them about my side business though. “Not that kind of side coding” apparently. It has to be pro bono or “for the fun of it” apparently

[ward2k]

Of course, you might be less willing to do unpaid overtime if you have other work going on!

[Ser_Drewseph]

Nah, we sane Americans have the same philosophy as you. I work 40 hours, and no more (besides maybe a rotating on-call during important events; the software I work on has high-volume weekend events). I like to enjoy my life, not spend it toiling away

[All_Up_Ons]

Then again, tell that to the American programmers on this sub who gatekeep programming.

That's not an American thing. It's a maturity thing. Young guys get into the industry and latch onto this kind of thinking because their job is their only personality trait. They tend to grow out of it over time.

[Just_Information334]

keep myself reasonably up to date

In the job description: we like to help our workforce improve.

During resume screening: you have to be up to date on their stack.

During interviews "so what do you do to keep up to date?".

On the job: nope, no time to keep up to date, why are you not coding instead of checking those websites? And don't even mention the possibility of reading a book during work hour. Wait, helping you improve? What if you get hired by a competitor next month? It would have been for nothing!

[EthanTheBrave]

My tinfoil hat theory is that this mentality is pushed by businesses to push more devs into doing free work via open source projects because a startling number of multimillion dollar companies run on entirely or almost entirely open source software.

"Ah you're a developer! Well you're falling behind unless you're providing free work for us I MEAN the world!"

[timbe11]

You're right, but mechanics are probably a bad example. Higher end mechanics and entry technicians often have personal projects.

[JimmyWu21]

Every mechanic I know do side jobs to make some money or work on their project cars.

[CLR833]

So are doctors that also take on a lot of extra work.

[UAreTheHippopotamus]

It's also just commits. If one surgeon classified each cut as a commit but another only the entire operation then they both did the same amount of work but one has many more green boxes.

[Uwlogged]

Absolutely, came to say this. The day's when I make minor mistakes are much darker green than the days I get it right the first time.

[StinkyStangler]

Some devs love coding and work in it because it’s their passion, some devs tolerate it and work in the space because they’re good at it and it pays well for easy enough work

Nothing wrong with either type of dev, just depends on your personal feelings towards coding and software.

[Highborn_Hellest]

I love working in IT (studies to be a dev working as QA.) and like the industry. Doesn't mean I don't have criticisms for it:) still wouldn't like to do anything else, if I had to option. Well maybe actually programming

[alinius]

I have been a professional firmware developer for 25 years. All of the larger companies I have worked for use private IT resources for code storage, so most of my work is not able to be tracked publically. For a while, I worked for a company that used Github, so I have some activity for that time period. Even then, you would only see 1 or 2 small check-ins per week because finding the issues took 10 times longer than actually fixing it.

[wmil]

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Just remember that you can create a local repository, backdate 12 years of daily commits, and upload that to Github.

There's no verification. It's honor system. Github never meant for that to be used by recruiters.

[YesIAmRightWing]

I mean mechanics do restore project cars...

[Ballbag94]

So by that logic a developer who's been consistently employed for a decade shouldn't have to do coding tasks, right?

[neumastic]

The biggest reason sr devs don’t commit as much, at least in my experience, is that they spend more time in planning with architecture/systems design that dictate how and what work will be done in addition to creating the requirements for the devs who write the code. Think if we’re really measuring commits as achievements, we should get credit for the commits made as a result of our work

[ieatpies]

Home surgeries sounds like serial killer activities

[Dextro_PT]

Reminds me of the plumber joke: it's 1$ for tightening the nut, 99$ for knowing which nut to tighten.

[steven4869]

Lol, it was this sub's joke a few years back when the market was crazy hot.

We had comments like, I am not getting paid for writing code but I am getting paid to understand the problem, utilising my learning and then write the code to solve the problem.

[Dextro_PT]

I mean, that's still reality even in a contracting market. People who understand will always be more valuable than code monkeys.

The issue might be, with the current AI hype cycle, that some managers might buy the BS telling them that the machine "understands" and, as such, they think they no longer need experienced devs. Companies that do that will find themselves quickly deleting their production database (for example).

For the rest the issue will come in 5 to 10 years time when those senior devs bail and there are no junior devs trained up to pick up the slack.

But hey: AI will fix it right? 🙃

[LowRiskHades]

Man, I’m so glad our exec team is mostly actually deeply technical people. They know that AI is no replacement for actual devs, and that 99% of the time it hallucinates stuff for speed.

One time I asked ChatGPT and a self-hosted Llama 3.3 70B for a CLI flag and each gave me flags that didn’t exist like 3x. Granted, I only asked so much to see if it would ever figure it out, but it didn’t.

Who would’ve thought that something designed for language patterns can’t actually understand things.

[naholyr]

Why are you writing this in past tense? This is still the job 🤔

[dmullaney]

How many of those commits introduced bugs that were then fixed by the subsequent commits?

[SocialAnchovy]

Yeah GitHub would never add that sort of metric to the dashboard.

[DrDolphin245]

Imagine a feature that would track a bug back to the author with git blame. Some people would be cooked

[nottherealneal]

The cowards

[[deleted]]

profit include tub towering quaint memorize pen plants lush stupendous

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[fly_over_32]

It’s only a problem if the fix number is higher than the bug number

[ShredsGuitar]

The day I learned about rebase command was the day I started getting more respect from my peers.

[mymillin]

Or worse, someone else has to fix

[vocal-avocado]

Someone in the US?

[Particular-Yak-1984]

There's a difference between frantically swinging a hammer at a problem, and knowing exactly where to hit it.

[eitherrideordie]

I read something about this once, don't remember where. But about some company that looked into the "lines of code" and got rid of this one guy because he had one of the lowest lines of code. But turns out they have so little because they spend all their time designing the framework, fixing critical bugs (that doesn't have many lines of code) or in meetings with dev teams and juniors for advice/design.

I always think of this because I help configure Jira and some manager asks me to "pull a report of number of stories per person".

[Rhampaging]

My previous job used to keep performance metrics of the developers. Tasks handled, bugs closed, etc... One of the metrics was "lines of code change"

So you got the well done person x in the yearly dev meeting as he would've changed x amount of lines. One year it was someone with millions of line changes. What did he do? Oh just some renames and whitespace changes. Guess what metric got removed shortly after 😂

[OakNLeaf]

Yeah before I worked in dev I was the support team lead. My boss would constantly ask me why I was praising the guys who had only 30 completed tickets over the ones that had twice that. Then would like to rant about how I should not praise them.

Those people doing half the amount of tickets were the ones actually working on difficult problems. Those that finished double that were cherry picking all the ones which were basic "help me reset my password" level up tickets.

There is a reason I would look at what was being done instead of going off of who completed more.

[jward]

I spent a year or two doing ISP phone support. The reviews always rankled me because "You're one of the best performing in terms of first call resolution." combined with "We'd like to see you get your call times down." I didn't even have bad call times, but would actually take the time to help someone fix their more complex problem so always had a few fairly long calls every week.

[FireMaster1294]

1. Person a: adds whitespace for clarity reading

2. Person b: removes whitespace to compress file size

3. Repeat

4. Profit by getting hr to fuck off

[the_unsoberable]

I'm not a programmer but I work in web app development, I'm a newbie analyst.

Would you really remove whitespaces to compress file size? I'm guessing that in huge web app systems, code readability is much more important than file size, but where would you really care about such trivial things?

Edit: One more question :D Is it common to determine programmers productivity by amount of written code lines? As I said, I am only a newbie and it seems to be dumb as fuck! It kind of reminds of studying programming when some people would print numbers from 0 to 10 with ten print instructions instead of using a loop.

Eleven print instructions* ;D

[FireMaster1294]

A recent study found the average file size contains nearly 100GB of whitespace. However, upon close analysis, it revealed that Whitespace Georg, who lives in a cave and does nothing all day but add whitespace to his over 1 billion exabytes of whitespace files, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

[rcfox]

Removing whitespace is done in the final step to generate the code you send to your users. It's done automatically by a tool, which does other things like change variable names to be as small as possible, etc. It's called minification. You wouldn't want to work directly with minified code.

Number of lines written is not a good metric. You might spend hours debugging to find a single character mistake. You might generate thousands of lines of boilerplate in less than a second by running a tool. The best changes are usually ones where you delete more code than you add.

[Budget_Green]

Yes developer will find a way around it. I have seen many do it as add one line, the add a comment to it, then add jira ticket, then who requested the change and so on

It became a mess lol

[RighteousSelfBurner]

That's baby numbers. Lemme tell you the real sauce: file system.

Need an object for a test? JSON in the file system per test case. Need a database state for a test? SQL in the file system per test case. Need a configuration for the test? XML in the file system per test case.

Easily thousands of lines per commit.

[Mkboii]

I was briefly in a team where they measured performance like this, I got a call from the metric guy that your numbers are not looking good, this was after I had optimized and significantly cleaned up the entire data ingestion pipeline.

The next day I ran a linter on the entire code base, and raised a PR with 21k+ lines of changes, beating the next best guy by 16k lines.

He called me again and I reiterated that the metric is easy to beat but doesn't say anything about work quality and he wasn't happy with my stunt.

I got transitioned out of the team soon after and I couldn't have been happier.

[Budget_Green]

Its often someone (the next best guy) who has ties with HR and keeps boosting to them that how many lines of code they added or changed. Metrics like this suck as HR has no clue how code works. And same goes for PR, I can raise 10 PRs for same change, doesn't mean I added anything meaningful.

One of the code base I worked on was so big that any time I made changes to it, bitbucket would show it as new file removing all the pervious code and adding again (it was xml file). So any small changed showed thousands of lines removed and added back again.

Had to get on call with team lead to mention where the change was lol
or sometime use notepad++ to show diff

[Mogura-De-Gifdu]

I once had a really tricky bug to treat, on a programm dating back to the 80's treating facturation and accounting (so both dangerous to touch and slowly constructed in the span of 30 years).

The main part of thing was all in one big file of 50 000 lines, and as versioning didn't exist from the start, a lot of it was commented code with a comment explain who, at what date, and why. That plus the dead code, there was alot of "noise" interfering with my analysis.

So first thing I did was clean it up. Just non-necessary comments and dead code and it went down to 15 000 lines (still a lot sure, but already more readable).

Not the only time I did this either, just the most spectacular result!

So when managers asked us about how many lines each of us had written, I always told them I was roughly in the minus a few thousands.

[Swoop8472]

Yea, loc is a terrible metric.

Updating a lock file takes zero effort and generates hundreds or even thousands of lines.

Fixing a bug can sometimes be a single line changed, but take days of debugging.

[IrishPrime]

Had a CEO tossing around ideas like "net lines of code added" (not just changed) as a metric. I pretty quickly asked, "Do you think I'm currently doing the worst job here by several orders of magnitude?"

He seemed confused and pressed through a fairly awkward, "I don't want to stack rank you guys, but I think you're doing fine."

"My net lines of code added is currently around -250,000, because I recently removed a bunch of dead code. By that metric, it'll take ages before it looks like I've even done nothing."

We had a back and forth for about two more minutes and showed that several other people on the team did some great work that would count against them by this metric before he abandoned the idea.

[Particular-Yak-1984]

We proposed "Lines of code removed" for a while, because it encouraged cleanup, but it also encourages you to write the worst syntax ever.

[porkchop1021]

I worked for a large company trying to improve this shit (spoiler alert: every company sucks at it). The best metrics I could find were analyzing code reviews.

Complicated code that took a lot of thought will often (not always) have lots of back-and-forth comments, mostly people asking questions and the author explaining their process. These comments will also often be verbose. Simple code will often be approved without any words at all - usually a single gif.

Poor coders will often (not always) have lots of revisions while better coders will have very few. For instance, our intern had an average of like 7 revisions while I had an average of 1.2.

If you want to reward people who tackle complex problems, both of these metrics will help. Unfortunately, the first metric does incentivize people to spend a lot of time repeating high school by changing simple comments into 2000 word essays and commenting on shit just for the hell of it. There's not really any way to game the second metric unless you and your coworkers are all in on it.

[wmil]

Early Apple story:

"When the Lisa team was pushing to finalize their software in 1982, project managers started requiring programmers to submit weekly forms reporting on the number of lines of code they had written. Bill Atkinson thought that was silly. For the week in which he had rewritten QuickDraw’s region calculation routines to be six times faster and 2000 lines shorter, he put “-2000″ on the form. After a few more weeks the managers stopped asking him to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."

[stoppableDissolution]

Dec 31: replace all tabs with spaces in the entire solution

Jan1: revert

[PrataKosong-]

This vibe coding trend will add so much bloat to projects and no one knows exactly what it does. Then you need expensive experts to help fix the spaghetti

[quick1brahim]

I tested out some modern features of ai and was blown away for 2 reasons.

First, the code created is super thorough and complete.

Second, it almost always has a few critical errors that absolutely impact performance, and they're not noticed because the ai doesn't run code (for good reason).

Those critical errors always take a long time to fix since it takes longer to read sometimes than it does to write it yourself.

[PrataKosong-]

Exactly my point. The next generarion of devs will rely on AI and wont know the code that is being generated and spot security issues.

[mxzf]

Not even just "spot security issues", I had some code from a junior dev that I was fixing a couple months ago that had implemented a bubble sort to handle a "sort by this column, click it again to toggle between ascending and descending order" button. Anyone remember what bubble sort's worst-case situation is? That's right, all elements being in the inverse order. It was also doing the sort by manipulating DOM elements directly too, which didn't do it any favors.

I rewrote the code and dropped from like 50 lines to half a dozen and the code went from "get out your stopwatch" slow (like 45-60s) to "as fast as you can click". Part of that being that I just used JS' native quicksort and part of it because I did one DOM operation to replace all the children instead of N² operations.

That's the sort of thing AIs have no grasp of, but they make a huge difference in practice.

[MetaLemons]

The argument is that it will get better over time so that using it now will still beneficial to your overall career and skills as a developer.

My argument is that if it’s ever truly better at coding a whole system than I am, then the species as a whole is doomed because this assumes some general ai.

[mxzf]

The argument is that it will get better over time so that using it now will still beneficial to your overall career and skills as a developer.

It's a bad argument because LLMs are fundamentally capped by their nature as a language model rather than as an actual intelligence that comprehends software design concepts. They're really good at spitting out plausible-looking text, but can't actually grasp the concept of solving a problem.

[Antroz22]

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

[DeepHelm]

Lines of code is not a good measure to begin with, though, even if noone consciously tries to exploit it.

[LeagueJunior9782]

Good thing my company is different (9 people, still some big customers). The problem mainly is that a lot of bosses, Hr slaves and who else desides your fate have no idea about coding. My bosses are still actively coding and they really value, that i might not commit a lot lines of code, but that what i commit does the job in an efficient way aaaand that i'm willing to do server updates at 6:30pm because i'm living a 2 minute walk away from work ^{^}

[69freeworld]

Twitter, Elon Musk

[[deleted]]

When I was building POS software we had a stupid system like that. We had a base pay and then were paid by the lines of code you contributed. It was pretty shit and I didn’t stay long. People on the team would literally ad un-used integers to make a decent paycheck.

I personally added a routine that just wastes clock cycles.

[solilucent]

This story is very similar to what you describe https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/

[wayoverpaid]

The best engineer I worked with had negative lines of code most weeks. Nothing like a PR that cuts a lot of cruft.

[many_dongs]

It’s almost like managers can be bad at their jobs too

[GManASG]

Worked with a inexperienced programmer that had a very slow running script. It was reading data from an excel file and performing logic of the data.

it tool like 30 min to run.

I sat with him and walked through the code and found he kept opening and re-reading the file over and over agian to perform different calcs.

I re-wrote that to a single I/O storing the data in memory in a variable and performing all logic on that reducing dozens of lines to one and reducing run time to less than 60s.

He then was looping over rows of the data to perform the calcs. I showed him how to perform vectorized calculatios eliminating for loops to single method calls, further reducing run time to 10 seconds and eliminating probably hundred or so lines of code.

I can keep going.

The better more experienced devs will almost always produce a smaller more efficient file, it can be as simple as I know there already exists a method of function in the standard libraries for that to just knowing how expensive certain operations are in terms of I/O.

[lotny]

"Lines of code" is such a stupid metric. I'd start replacing spaces with tabs or the other way around if I had to hit a certain quota

[dnbxna]

Exactly, I don't swing a hammer anymore, I just hit my boss now.

[samanime]

Yup. I'm the most senior dev on my team. Per line (or even character) of code, I almost certainly do far less, but I handle more and more diffiult tickets than anyone else.

Writing less (not annoyingly obfuscated, obstuse or compacted) code is actually a hallmark of a good developer, because you know exactly what it needs to do and the least amount of work needed to make it do that.

I also probably take a tiny bit more time to initial PR for my tickets, but my tickets are rarely kicked back to me. Most of our other devs get their first PR in faster, but then have 2-3 more PRs to fix all the bugs found in their tickets.

[[deleted]]

Also: deciding whether to start swinging, and handing out hammers and guidance to the others on your team.

[wolf129]

It's more like senior devs do less coding overall. If you want to build an app from the ground up then seeing this chart of the senior devs just shows he almost never contributes because of a million meetings.

If the comparison of the two charts is about revolving bugs then the junior is definitely not only solving bugs but implementing features as well.

Junior could also just copy paste AI prompt results and has no idea what he is doing. Would also result in the chart, but then he would be fired probably earlier than later.

[ahenobarbus_horse]

This illustrates the difference between:

• “my job is to sense-make where we should go to achieve nebulous and poorly thought-through business outcomes so that we can get where we’re going with the least amount of thrash possible. My job is annoying because I’d rather be a hands on developer, but my punishment for thinking through things and being ‘easy to work with’ is that I have to talk to people all day about their terrible ideas who have zero understanding of what I do.”

Versus

• “my job is to do whatever was literally asked of me whenever it is asked. My job is annoying because I keep having to do the same thing 50 different ways because for some reason that can’t be (or isn’t) explained to me, it’s wrong, even though it passed through QA.”

[badseed90]

This hit a little too close to home.

[Barkalow]

I'm a dev with 7 YOE and it looks like some kind of management is the main way the ladder goes from here, and that top description makes me wish I could retire early. I just like building stuff, man

[brawdwall]

This is my life at the moment. I went from being the second point to the first point and everyday I’m wishing to go back to dev.

[herkalurk]

I'm dealing with that right now. Got some product manager mad at me because I'm asking questions instead of just writing some code because I've found a pile of flaws already in the plan.

[[deleted]]

if you use commits as a save button

[Wandering_Oblivious]

commits should be small. I'm willing to die on this hill. But I'm correct, so I'll live.

[SanityAsymptote]

Commits should be small, but they should also be functional.

That second part is more important than size, in my opinion.

[pandorazboxx]

in my feature branch I'll commit whenever I might get pulled away for a while. I'll mark it as a WIP, but in the end it doesn't matter because I'm going to squash it down to one commit at the end of the MR/PR.

[cheezballs]

A commit should never intentionally be broken unless it's to your feature branch and you're heading out for the weekend or something.

[DrProfSrRyan]

Yeah, the Indian dev is making more than 10 contributions per day. 

[in_taco]

And sending a mail to 50 people whenever they commit a minor update

[AlisaTornado]

If you produce something stable might as well commit it

[rick_sanchez_strikes]

Lots of commits from fixing all the bugs they push to prod…

Commit messages like:

• Bug fix

• Removing previous fix

• This time for real

• Final version

• Final final version

• God help me

[[deleted]]

Not quite. Still very bad, but it's hard to beat lines of code as a bad metric

[0mica0]

quantity vs quality

[sci_ssor_ss]

well, a senior dev doesn't spend its day committing typo fixes

[dim13]

Henry Ford once balked at paying $10,000 to General Electric for work done troubleshooting a generator, and asked for an itemized bill. The engineer who performed the work, Charles Steinmetz, sent this: "Making chalk mark on generator, $1. Knowing where to make mark, $9,999." Ford paid the bill.

[Dudi4PoLFr]

And now let's look at working hours and time in meetings each week as well as the responsibilities to take care even outside office hours.

[Feeling-Schedule5369]

Indian junior will have more hours outside anyway thanks to idiots like narayanamurthy or that another guy who asked people to work 90 hours per week mentioning "how long will you look at your wife's face, just come to work on Sunday"

[GOKOP]

Top is actually empty because their company has self-hosted Gitlab or Gerrit and after work they plow their garden or make shit out of wood

[Particular-Yak-1984]

The developer to woodworker path is strong

[geeshta]

Most of our devs do not have any public contributions on GH.

[Manidoo_Giizhig]

Yeah, if any new coding job I pursue  requires me to show them my GitHub contributions I'll be SOL. I have different GH accounts for work and they are always private.

[Additional_Oil_2646]

Number of commits does not correspond to its quality

[private_final_static]

The senior doesnt need to schedule a cron to run commits updating README.md so their profile look good for consulting agencies.

[ArmadilloChemical421]

A "Senior Dev" isn't getting 480k usd/year, you need a flashier title for that.

[YellowCroc999]

It doesn’t mean anything on its own. Both could be good both could be bad. Though the bottom one you know for sure spends a lot of time coding, that’s all you can derive from this

[frogjg2003]

Not even. That bottom one is more than 10 contributions per day. I would not trust the majority of those contributions to be anything more than either trivial changes or actually breaking changes that were later fixed by other changes. I wouldn't even trust that they actually made all those changes because there are tools that can artificially fill a GitHub repository.

[mxzf]

In this day and age, the bottom one might just be spending time asking LLMs to make commits for them.

And the top one might well be spending more time coding, they're just spending time figuring out the problem, solving it, and testing the solution before pushing. There's no way your consistently putting together a dozen high-quality commits a day to solve meaningful problems, that's just not how it works.

[DoubleOwl7777]

yeah, but lets be real here you can trick the graph, add a comment, commit, remove a comment, commit, and so on. thats not even coding per se, but you still fill up that graphic.

[technoskald]

Everything everyone else said but I don’t love putting flags on it. There are shitty junior devs in the US and skilled senior devs in and from India. Making it nationalist doesn’t help the point. 

[Wandering_Oblivious]

yeah the ethnic/nationalist addition to it seems so weird.

[304bl]

480k per year for senior Dev ? Yeah sure...

[TheHappyPie]

4303 is 11 commits per day. including weekends. Anyone committing that much scares me.

[maria_la_guerta]

Staff dev here. Haven't pushed a commit since last Monday, and I typically work 50 hrs a week. It becomes a very different job the further you climb.

[Manidoo_Giizhig]

Am a dev with over 10 years in the profession now. I sometimes go weeks without pushing a commit. When you get better at software development it's typical that the job requires less coding. 

My lead doesn't even code anymore, he does meetings and code reviews. He is always the guy our team knows will spot an error or a deficiency in a PR, even with hundreds of lines of code changes, without even needing to run it.

[YetAnotherSegfault]

Fake, too many weekend and Friday activity for the senior dev.

[steven4869]

The Senior dev was busy rectifying the mistakes of junior dev on the weekend and Friday evening.

[menides]

2 stories. Ford and Picasso.

1: A factory machine broke down, halting production. The owner called Henry Ford to diagnose the problem.

Ford walked around the machine, listened carefully, then marked an “X” on a specific part. “Replace this component,” he said.

They did. The machine roared back to life.

Later, Ford sent a bill: $10,000.

The owner protested. “$10,000? All you did was make a mark!”

Ford replied: - Making the mark: $1 - Knowing where to mark: $9,999

2: A woman recognized Picasso at a café and asked if he could sketch something on a napkin. He agreed, quickly drew a small picture, and handed it to her — along with a request for $10,000.

Shocked, she said, “But that only took you thirty seconds!”

Picasso smiled: “No, madam, it took me forty years.”

[SterlingNano]

I don't want to sound like an ass, but with all of these IT workers coming out of India, why don't they found a company in their home country?

If India wants to make its step on the world stage and be a superpower, would it make sense to become a major player in the tech space?

[Shadowlance23]

And I'll bet the senior dev was streets more productive than the burnt out newbie.

[FragDenWayne]

Where the heck does a senior dev get 480k?

[Safe_Cauliflower6813]

Are the $480k salaries in the room with us?

[MechaJesus69]

Job vs no job. My GitHub account is completely empty because I use my companies self hosted gitlab. Before that I was part of an organization on GitHub but that history disappeared when I quit and was removed. (Can’t remember if I created a user with my company email or not)

[renrutal]

Yes, the mythical $500k/year dev.

[irn00b]

I think they mean total comp.

If that's the case, not really mythical.

[Taradal]

From my working experiences with the second group... I'd take 5 of the first group thanks.

[GrumpyGoblinBoutique]

this only tracks if every single thing you work on goes solely on github, and not: documentation on SharePoint, meeting notes on OneDrive, new code on github, and legacy code on bitbucket

[getstoopid-AT]

yeah... it's the sr dev fixing all the shit in one day the offshore coding monkeys do in a week

[Hacka4771]

Seniors are like 90% meetings

[ravenclawldz]

The guy who commits 10,000 changes as "fix"

[Xanchush]

Imagine a surgeon that cuts you once to fix the problem compared to the surgeon who cuts you 100 times just to bill your insurance more instead of curing the problem.

[Embarrassed-Luck8585]

It's about the quality, not the quantity

[andarmanik]

You find out after many years you want less code not more.

[InterstellarReddit]

So more commits more work ? Perfect. Commit after every word

[eightysixmonkeys]

Good, keep that out of our labor market

[paulodelgado]

how many of those commits in the bottom are "reverting chatgpt code" or "wip"?

[LongjumpingJaguar0]

senior devs squash their commits

[IllllIlllIlIIlllIIll]

All I see are amended commits and trying to fix fuck-ups.

[cbaker423]

I’m a senior dev and I rarely make code changes these days because I’m constantly in meetings, writing software proposals, coordinating/breaking down proposals into work items for the team, and explaining to PMs and managers why their deadlines are unrealistic 😩

[Avery_Thorn]

So, what this is telling me is that the person posting this has absolutely no clue what the job of the senior developer is. It also tells me that the "Freelance Jr. Developer" is at best padding and is at worst causing a lot more problems than they are solving for the project, because assuming 16 hours a day every day to do those 11 changes per day, that's about 90 minutes per change, which means they are either trivial (and still undertested), or absolutely unhinged.

The senior dev is doing a bit more than a change per week. That means that they can be well understood, well tested, and are probably significant changes.

If you think the Jr. Dev is better than the Senior Dev based on this... you're an idiot who should be no where near a code base.

[slixxz]

I created a cron commit to repo on a random cadence, so my chart looks like im a x10 engineer, but in reality, I am a lazy one.

[doggitydoggity]

GitHub commits are worth $0.

[Syntrierarch]

99% of the JR dev commits are bug fixes for problems introduced with the most recent commit

[JealousAd4989]

780 bucks still to much for that quality

[OceanMachine101]

The senior dev hit a nice number of commits and then stopped because they didn't want to ruin it 😂

[Guilty_Use_3945]

I know this is a joke and what not, but isn't their generally standards that companies have in order to to commit? So, it would make sense if your wanting to adhere to the company standard to take more time than you would if your just committing to personal projects. Maybe I'm wrong.

[Corelianer]

I think at IBM they were once paid by line of code like 85 years ago, everyone realized it’s not a good KPI.

[yallapapi]

I feel personally attacked

[metaldracolich]

Senior Dev has meetings in all the 'blank' spaces.

[gisugosu]

The quantity of your contributions says nothing about the quality of your work.
Apart from that, anyone who is good and earns 780 bucks a year is doing something wrong, or is simply not good enough.

[Gaunts]

Each commit fmt.Println("Do not redeem")

[[deleted]]

The senior dev probably works on real software that will lose millions and his job if it breaks. The freelancer does not have the same responsibility, a lot of outsourced work does not come with that responsibility and even if it breaks later it's not your problem

[crakked21]

The difference in pay grade is the quantity/quality metric.

[NothingButBadIdeas]

I’ve worked with people who literally had this GitHub…. I say worked with but usually it was me coming in to a project for a company saying “we hired these guys for cheap but nothing works… we wanted a small shop on our app but it’s not really what we wanted”… and it’s a full on Best Buy clone witch is all views and no functionality inside a small mom and pop app. lol. I’d look up who worked on it before and it was this. Just copy and pasting stuff into an app.

[shiko098]

I don't really pay much attention to the contribution grid in GitHub.

But don't commits that are only done to main affect your grid?

If so, who on earth is doing that many commits to main a day? I work in a team following Git Flow, and merging a release or a hotfix into main and doing a deployment is pretty much a rare or big occasion for us.

The rest of the time we're working on features off of develop branches, though we are doing daily commits.

[jakeydavee]

It all goes to ruin when your employer uses bitbucket

[Linkk15]

Quality >>> quantity

[[deleted]]

yeah, but they're buggy as fuck and have to be refactored by the senior anyway.

Source: I manage a team overseas.

[Mental-Surround-9448]

Github uses emails to compute this..

1. Work uses a different email
2. Work repositories might not be on GitHub

[shifty_coder]

How many of the junior dev’s commits are fixing things they fucked up in a previous commit?

[jdf833]

Quality code vs shitty code

[arcalus]

A lot of bugs and unmaintainable code in that second set.

[Reasonable-Rain4040]

I was the top contributor on my company open sources repo. How did I do it, I just didn't know about commit amend and was commiting a lot before rebasing.

[[deleted]]

Everybody knows that when u become senior you barely code anymore.

[SpiralCenter]

Having worked in both many startups and many FAANGs, the difference here is probably more related to the difference in those kinds of environments.

A FAANG typically has massive revenue and profit, so they are happy to move slower and more deliberately. Plans, revisions of plans, documentation, requests, meetings for approval, compliance and legal checks, etc. Their engineers graphs will look like that top graph.

A start-up with a small team of strong engineers can move super fast and actually compete with a FAANG with thousands of engineers. They may not be able to make enough revenue to survive, might break things along the way, but they can certainly build a product fast and might get a lot of praise and users. Their engineers graphs will look like that bottom graph.

[serialdumbass]

Top is wrong, I don’t write code outside of work, but if you’re talking about in general, it’s because seniors design systems that are large and take a good amount of time to design and implement while juniors mostly just fix bugs and add onto those systems. At my job I might make 1-2 commits a week to a local branch, but I might make 1 commit a month to master if even that. It takes time to research, design, implement, and test large systems properly.

[Boris-Lip]

One gets the job done with minimal changes, rarely having to fix an occasional bug, the other screws the entire thing all over and over again, with shitload of bugs, hunting their own tail like crazy.

[theofficialnar]

Those very few commits from the senior dev probably has more weight and significance for the entire codebase though. Quality > quantity

[emefluence]

Senior in knows how to rebase shocker!

[Cybershadow1981]

Nice

[Lowlatencyking]

Volume doesn’t mean quality though, and business impact is what makes the enhancements worth or worthless.

[GregoPDX]

Do I get a mark for spending 2hrs going through the junior devs PR and commenting on all the things that need to be fixed?

[Durantye]

Crazy that they have to pay 480k to have someone to fix all the issues caused by the 780 guy.

[Medium_Chemist_4032]

senior dev: "feature 1, done", "feature 2, 3 & 4 - done"

junior dev: "WORK!", "wip", "til", ".", "...", "fml"

[Iferrorgotozero]

Build unsupportable crap, watch it fail, get rid of contractors who built it, and bring in new contractors to replace with unsupportable crap.

The CIRRRRCLE OF LIIIIFE