[chrisseaton]

> contributed thousands of lines of features/fixes/optimizations to high profile projects

What's more responsible than pushing code to a high-profile project? Responsible for the product's performance, security. Responsible for what the customer sees and experiences. Responsible for keeping their data safe and guarding the company's reputation.

Responsible enough to be allowed to work independently from home.

Responsible enough to travel the world representing the company in-person.

[watwut]

That sounds more like rhetorics and framing to me, not responsibility as normally used in English. Especially the work from home and travelling - calling work from home responsibility is ridiculous. Pretending that every work travel implies some kind of "guarding the company's reputation" is making too much from nothing.

Being responsible for product's performance and security means something completely different then "having commits". Having commits does not make you accountable for either nor able to influence either. Except maybe by making it worst - if you work on part of the software that is actually influencing either.

I can fix tons of bugs in open source software without having responsibility for anything. The fact is, modern software development is oftentimes factory where you get task, you do task and then forget about it all. If you had not done the task, nothing grave would not happen except that you would loose job over time. And that is all there is to it.

[DuskStar]

My reading was that those were to open source projects the company didn't control.

[chrisseaton]

Contributions required by paying customers as a result of a commercial support contract.

If he's pushing to Redis he's responsible for the integrity of probably billions of dollars worth of data. That's a massive, international-scale level of responsibility, in the name of his employer. That's huge responsibility!

[sixstringtheory]

And to boot, he has a portfolio of work he can show potential next employers instead of it being blackholed in a private repo forever.