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Or alternatively (assuming that's true) he fired the people who thought about what they commit and kept those whose commit logs look like: "push feature WiP", "fix", "more fixes", "push", "maybe this works?"...

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Reportedly a portion of them were thinking so hard they did not commit anything at all.

Ironically, those may have been the staff with the most institutional knowledge. Seeing people argue, here of all places, that loc or commit frequency == institutional knowledge is … unexpected. New hires committing “whitespace cleanup” != institutional knowledge.

Someone had to actually write all that code and it inevitably shows up in the stats. People who work on the code most tend to know it the most. Although people in non-coding roles sometimes prefer to deny it.

Sure there had so be some frequent but low impact committers. But implying that people with lowest amount of code contribution must have more impact is ridiculous.

I mean, a staff engineer who stopped committing couple years ago? Yeah could be burnout, or could be some major contribution that's not in the stats. OTOH an IC on their second year in position who hadn't pushed a single line? Nah the institutional knowledge is safe without.

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