The same goes for code comments though people are much more vocal about their disdain. It's ironic given how frequent AI is used to generate docs. But docs are much better written by the person who wrote the code, the person who has all the context.

These things never take much time but people dismiss them because of that. Because each commit and each comment in isolation isn't very valuable but they are very helpful in aggregate. I'm not sure why this bias exists though, since the same is true for lines of code. It's also true about a ton of things. All the little things add up. Just because it's little now doesn't mean it's not important

Indeed. If you can't spend two minutes (MAX) writing a sentence or two explaining what the commit is for, then what are we doing as developers? Commits are for future you and your future team. They are a tool. Please, use them.

Good commit messages would be nice but honestly I would be over the moon if our pull requests would be approved within a week without having to ping one or more people.

Some of my favorite are the perhaps well-meaning but totally misguided log of what files they changed.

This reads like the intern was left to his own devices and his output not checked at all for three weeks straight. Actual tutoring would have surfaced the issue after 1 or 2 days tops.

I don't agree. These things actually matter. A developer who isn't told otherwise is just going to do whatever they feel like, so if there is nothing or no-one enforcing the standards, then the failure isn't on the individual developer, it is on the team lead. Someone needs to be setting the standards.

In the company I work for, there is a team that has isolated itself to some extent from other teams and works at a furious pace to keep their particular section of the business happy. We're lucky enough that they spun up their own repo to do their work on, so they don't actually impact other teams, but if the quality of the commit messages is anything to go by, I am 100% certain they're going to end up in a huge mess, if they aren't already. The team lead encourages this, and certainly doesn't care about commit messages etc.

Developers who care about other developers tend to write better quality code, because they care what other developers think of them. If you care about other developers, you will most likely write decent quality commit messages too.

I have seen over many years the types of developers who only care about moving their own code into production as fast as possible and getting to the next thing. There is a very high correlation with a mess at the end, which they inevitably won't have to tidy up because they'll be doing the next thing. These types of developers hate owning stuff in production, so they don't do it, so they don't actually care how maintainable their "clever" code is. I am very certain that a number of people reading this will be those types of developers.

Useless? So you never use “git annotate” or your IDE to see who wrote a line of code whose purpose puzzles you, and go to the commit message to see what they were trying to accomplish? This is invaluable to me as long as commit messages are clear.

As a manager, one of the first things I do is make sure that the PR titles (the PR text becomes the commit messages in squash-merging workflows) at minimum begin with a ticket number. Then we can later read both the intention and the commentary on it.

I partially disagree. Technical leadership at the micro/mid level should be able to set and enforce standards like "you must have semi-meaningful or meaningful commit messages." If and only if they set those standards, and the team does not follow them, then we can say that either the leadership is lacking, or there is a structural barrier/disincentive to following the rules. Within that framework, I do think using process-smells like this is valid for judging technical leadership.

To the point of other commenters however, I wouldn't lay something this micro at the foot of the CTO in all but the smallest of organizations.

It's a stretch to lay at the CTOs feet, but not the team lead or even Head/VP of Engineering IMHO. It's also easy to "enforce" if you're already doing peer review (which you definitely should be, even if not required for compliance).

I personally find this to be a substantially better pattern. That squashed commit also becomes the entire changeset - so from a code archeology perspective it becomes much easier to understand what and why. Especially if you have a team culture that values specific PRs that don’t include unrelated changes. I also find it thoroughly helpful to be able to see the PR discussions since the link is in the commit message.