Comment by lolinder
1 month ago
> at every place I've worked you could get a starting point idea of who the top devs were by looking at overall code commits.
This works for Junior through Senior level roles, but it falls apart quickly when you have Staff+ roles in your company. Engineers in those roles still code, but they write a fraction of what they used to and that is by design—you want these people engineering entire initiatives, integrations, and migrations. This kind of work is essential and should be done by your top devs, but it will lead to many fewer commits than you get out of people who are working on single features.
With a few exceptions for projects with a high degree of source-level complexity, a Staff+ engineer who's committing as much as your Senior engineers is probably either misleveled or misused.
Yeah, I've always worked at non-tech companies with pretty small teams and no roles like that. But it seems like any place with Staff+ engineers should know better than to try to stack them up against more junior devs based on some metric.
Case in point, I worked with a Staff software engineer (I was also the same level) who consistently, half over half, had zero diffs to their name.
Because they were leaning more into a product archetype - which it turns out they were very suited to.
I have a decent number of commits as a staff engineer, but barely any are on ‘features’ as measured by story points.
We’re building the things that other people use to deliver features better and faster.