1,145 pull requests per day

The comments so far are surprising. Yea counting PRs and lines of code isn’t impressive, and yes you may also do them at your own company. Any engineer will tell you, if you push code often and continuously move it to production, regression is inevitable. In finance, at a scale that stripe operates, not making mistakes is very critical. Being able to do what the articles describes is very impressive in any engineering organization. Being able to do that as Stripe is even more impressive.

My previous company averaged 2 PRs (and deploys) per engineer per day across a small team. At my current company I'm averaging about 2.5 CLs per day (they're a bit smaller changes). Stripe is good at this, but this is very achievable.

Often the problem is that we put too much into a single change. Smaller changes means easier reviews, better reviews, less risky deploys, forces better tooling for deployments and change management, often lower latency, and even often leads to higher throughput because of less WIP taking up head space and requiring context switching. The benefits are so compounding that I think it's very undervalued in some orgs.

Is counting the number of pull requests a useful measure of engineering performance ergo product performance and company perf?

Isn't it more like a BS counter that keep incrementing and that is indicative of churn but nothing else reliably.

One of the most low effort, easily to game metric that can be skewed to show anything that the user wants to show.

Conventional "dev" wisdom says that LOC and PR count don't matter but I think its very easy to combine this data point with the nature of a dev's work to come up with a great heuristic on productivity.

Is there any description of Stripe's architecture and infrastructure somewhere published?

Diminishing returns at some point, but, I think the counterpoint to this is companies who are doing a single huge manual deployment every month (or less) which is scheduled into a 4-hour outage window where many if not all services will be down for this period.

I do agree there isn't a lot of delta between a company doing 2 or 10 deploys a day and a company doing 1,200, but, there's a huge engineering gap between companies who do approximately .03 deploys per day and those doing multiple.

Having minute of downtime per year is quite a big tradeoff.

It makes sense for Stripe, they would lose lot of money when not operating. But in smaller companies you can choose to take more downtime to reduce engineering time.

Instead of skirting around doing gradual data transformations on live data, you could take service offline and do all of it once.

This sounds like how PMS sometimes tout the number of tickets per sprint. It's not a relevant metric, and it's easily gamed

How many of those prs were small fixes? How many went to low used services, or services only used internally?

They clearly have strong set of tooling for dev ops stuff, and I do believe that stripe has strong technical chops, but this number does not show that they are delivering value. It just shows they are delivery something... Somewhere

PRs merged is the LOC count. Completely useless measure of anything really.

How many of those people are actually working on the core payments flow that they're measuring the uptime of?

I'm sure most people are working on some settings UI, fraud or risk tools, etc.

Seem to be getting a 404?

https://web.archive.org/web/20250523000025/https://saile.it/...

More is not always better though. The simplicity of Stripe that made its success is not there anymore, ask anyone that had to build a stripe integration recently.

We do a lot of PRs as well. Most are automatically created and pushed.

404

I hope they're not using GitHub; my inbox is unusable from GitHub talking to itself and choosing to stand next to me at the party, and we're not [currently] doing anywhere near that volume

I've gotten some handle on it by some gmail filters but holy hell if you want to make sure I don't see something, smuggle it in a From:github.com email

With the new Copilot makes PRs, I could easily imagine getting to 1145 PRs per day, of which 45 will actually make it across the line and not be filled with horseshit

Sure, looks cool but really means nothing without looking at the type of changes. I could think of many tricks if I wanted to chase this stat

Impact is what matters. Not PRs/diffs or LoC. These are PHB KPIs.

Basically, they're bragging about how busy their engineers are making themselves look.

I would think they have elite testing and QA team to make that happen

Lol, yeah but a PR won't fix that expired cert.

How often and how much you change your codebase is not something to brag about.