I left off a key point; your code doesn’t need to ship to production, I just think you should do _something_. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
> I can personally say that the satisfaction is far bigger the longer you've persevered.
It’s a great feeling to finish something. I find I’m more likely to finish it well if I break it up versus ship it all at once (and my teammates thank me)
I was about to say; if we replace 'ship' with 'commit' I'm in full agreement.
If you're a full time developer I don't know why you wouldn't.
Commits are communication. If we're making them often and correctly, there's that much less fluffing around with reports and status updates and meetings that we need to do.
The merits of CI/CD notwithstanding I definitely do NOT want my reports feeling like they need to deploy every day. That will lead to rushed work and errors on production.
But commit, why not? I don't care if it's in a private branch, behind a feature flag, or even some notes/pseudocode in a comment, commit it. Write an actual decent commit message while you're at it. That way as your manager, I can call up your commit history before our 1:1, and by the time the meeting starts it's already 80% finished because I was able to update myself on what you've been doing.
I don't know about routine skimming of history, but promo committees in big tech look at both commits and code reviews (the comments you left on others' commits).
I work at a FAANG like company, and here it's just annual performance reviews, that include bunch of achievements and then politics. No way anyone is going to check anyone's commit history. There are huge calibration meetings where managers have to stand up for their engineers on who gets what kind of performance rating and who gets promoted, and it's just verbal debates. There's just no way anyone can bring up someone's commit history and have enough time to explain what is going on overall.
And managers have little clue about the actual work that is going on. Definitely not enough clue to understand what commits are about, even if they have had a technical background overall.
> I can personally say that the satisfaction is far bigger the longer you've persevered.
It’s a great feeling to finish something. I find I’m more likely to finish it well if I break it up versus ship it all at once (and my teammates thank me)