It’s largely known that counting commits and pull requests as a measure of engineering productivity is a bad idea. There are many reasons why it’s a bad idea. It’s easy to game. More importantly, software engineering is not just about committing code. Quite often its about not committing any code.
Quantity of commits might only be meaningful if SLoC is also considered - five small, atomic commits that took an hour will look like "more" than a single, larger atomic commit that took a couple of days of deep thought and that touches many parts of the system.
I wonder if the "virtuous cycle" also has a bit of a "closing off" effect to others. In other words, if someone is prolific, and their mind is the source of a great deal of the code, there could be an effect where everyone else must play "catch-up". I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it may create a re-enforcing loop of familiarity/productivity that is hard to compete with.
Quantity of commits might only be meaningful if SLoC is also considered - five small, atomic commits that took an hour will look like "more" than a single, larger atomic commit that took a couple of days of deep thought and that touches many parts of the system.
I wonder if the "virtuous cycle" also has a bit of a "closing off" effect to others. In other words, if someone is prolific, and their mind is the source of a great deal of the code, there could be an effect where everyone else must play "catch-up". I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it may create a re-enforcing loop of familiarity/productivity that is hard to compete with.
Very well put! Thank you for the bitesized summary.