I find the sort of opinions on this post quite common on a subset of engineers - namely mid levels with some time in the career, who start to consider themselves senior engineers and want everyone to follow the same set of strict rules they decided make sense. It’s the same mindset that makes people pedantically apply DRY to every situation or forcing others to TDD basic apps.
In practice:
- smaller PRs aren’t necessarily easier to review (and this arbitrary obsession almost always leads to PR overload in chunks that don’t make any sense, reducing code quality as a result)
- nobody reads intermediate commit messages one by one on a PR, period. I worked on a team where the lead was adamant about this and started to write messages in the vein of “if you’re reading this message, I’ll give u $5”. I never paid anyone a dollar. Don’t waste your time writing stuff for no one.
- “every commit must compile” - again, unnecessary overzealousness. Every commit on the MAIN branch definitely should compile. Wasting your time with this in a branch, as you work towards a solution, is focusing on the wrong thing
You want PRs because they help others absorb what you’re doing (they’ll have to read that same code sooner or later). You don’t want to create a performance theater.
In practice:
- smaller PRs aren’t necessarily easier to review (and this arbitrary obsession almost always leads to PR overload in chunks that don’t make any sense, reducing code quality as a result)
- nobody reads intermediate commit messages one by one on a PR, period. I worked on a team where the lead was adamant about this and started to write messages in the vein of “if you’re reading this message, I’ll give u $5”. I never paid anyone a dollar. Don’t waste your time writing stuff for no one.
- “every commit must compile” - again, unnecessary overzealousness. Every commit on the MAIN branch definitely should compile. Wasting your time with this in a branch, as you work towards a solution, is focusing on the wrong thing
You want PRs because they help others absorb what you’re doing (they’ll have to read that same code sooner or later). You don’t want to create a performance theater.