I agree we should give recognition and encouragement to devs, but I think there are other ways to do it we could think about besides sheer number of commits, +2s or lines modified.
I personally think that rewarding high numbers encourages quantity over quality (only big numbers are recognized) and also encourages a culture of hero developers[1] that is discouraging for casual or new volunteers and grows our silos bigger.
I, for example, value better good -1 code reviews (well written, thoughtful, and when you learn new things), rather than 10s of +2s, and for example IMO a reviewer price would be hand picked from nominations for this kind of reviews rather than automatically picked from top number of +2s.
[1]: There's always a small group of *heroes* that are highly productive because -besides them being great developers- of the background knowledge, familiarity with the code bases and other developers that are always going to be in the top of most these metrics. On Apr 4, 2016 5:22 PM, "Niklas Laxström" niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com wrote:
2016-04-04 17:02 GMT+03:00 Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org:
The first question to answer is what information are you looking for when you want to measure developers' "productivity". What would be the motivation of that estimation? What is the motivation behind this thread?
One reason comes to me mind. My gut feeling is that we are not very good at consistently giving recognition for technical work. One possible reason is that we do not have clear and understandable metrics or promote those metrics enough. Nor am I aware of any process for awards and celebration (The Academy Awards would be an example in another context, also Wikipedian of the year).
As an example, I recall vaguely that during the Bugzilla times we used to have regular emails on wikitech-l with list of people who closed most bugs.
Having some metrics for different activities could stir up some healthy competition (also unhealthy if we are not careful) and of course there is a lot of important work that is not visible from the numbers only.
I am not expert on this subject, but I think developers (especially volunteers, but also others) are more likely to stick around if they feel that their work is recognized and appreciated. For the latter we already know that we should improve our code review process.
-Niklas
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