
Ask HN: How do you feel about “Git metrics” evaluating developers? - patrickdevivo
I&#x27;ve seen a number of tools recently related to measuring &quot;developer metrics&quot; by examining git data. Gitprime (now owned by Pluralsight?) and waydev.co.<p>I&#x27;m curious to know what developers on the receiving end of these tools think - are they invasive? Are they useful? Does it feel weird being &quot;watched&quot; in this way?<p>Like any tool, a lot depends on how these metrics are used - and who&#x27;s looking at them and making what kind of judgments.<p>I can see the value on some level as a means to potentially improve developer efficiency...but I&#x27;m curious to know how that actually plays out
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dylz
I feel like this is partially getting into a technical vs social problem where
if you're tracking peoples' "new LoC writte, existing LoC edited, number of
commits per day, comments per PR on other people" type of stuff you end up
with bullshit artists optimising for maximum analytics impact, good devs being
penalised for "slacking off", and all sorts of other crap that comes with
trying to optimise for these effects.

It's kind of like how in a proper team where there is already trust and no
micromanagement, everyone continues to do their work and remain productive no
matter what, while often in a team where management does not care about ICs
and treats them as disposable, and the they only show up for an income, are
hourly, or just churn out crap in volume, they're gonna slack off as soon as
your back is turned.

It entirely depends on their use, ask the team(s) involved first, and the
level of trust. You'll be strung out to hang if your team already doesn't
trust you and now you want to throw this "surveillance watchdog garbage" at
them.

If your team trusts you as management, you may get some kind of buy-in as to
how some graphs may help them work smarter, but at that point it's likely
something they don't _need_, and if you start forcing value judgements off
that data there's a high chance they're going to resent you for it.

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patrickdevivo
I agree that trust is fundamental to tools/metrics like this, and will
determine how they're used. What I find interesting (concerning?) is that they
seem to be marketed towards managers/VPs/CTOs exclusively (people "outside"
the team) to better understand what's going on _within_ the team, which seems
flawed (but also makes sense, considering who's making buying decisions). I
understand the value proposition of "getting the most" out of your (expensive)
engineering team, but presenting a product in this way seems to set the stage
for "misuse" right off the bat. Maybe I'm biased, but it feels like these
tools might be more palatable if framed to help ICs improve and understand
their own behaviors within a team

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thesuperbigfrog
What do you want to optimize for?

If you have tools that use git to pull metrics to see who your "best"
developers are, don't be surprised if developers create or use tools to
optimize their changes for the metrics rather than add value to the codebase.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

