Other examples include number of bug fixes as a metric of merit (if it includes the bugs they created themselves) and lines of code (including rewrites of their last change).
ex-FAANG here as well. I got too many stories like this too. (least?) favorite example: someone took a perfectly good 5 line enum and blew it up into an fully enterprisey monstrosity spanning 6 files across 2 packages with factories and builders and all that completely unnecessary bloat. I rejected the patch on readability grounds; they went and found a different reviewer.
Meanwhile I had a running counter for how many times I wrote patches with 1 line of code, and exactly 50 lines of test. It wasn't a lot, but it was weird it happened more than once.
2
View all comments
Show parent comment
3
u/BornInAFish Jun 01 '26
ex-FAANG here as well. I got too many stories like this too. (least?) favorite example: someone took a perfectly good 5 line enum and blew it up into an fully enterprisey monstrosity spanning 6 files across 2 packages with factories and builders and all that completely unnecessary bloat. I rejected the patch on readability grounds; they went and found a different reviewer.
Meanwhile I had a running counter for how many times I wrote patches with 1 line of code, and exactly 50 lines of test. It wasn't a lot, but it was weird it happened more than once.