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by shawabawa3 1326 days ago
Have you ever worked at a company where every engineer has in depth knowledge of git?

In my experience 90% of software engineers get as far as pull, push, commit, maybe merge. Rebase and amend if you're very lucky

Squash merges make git easier to use for 90% of engineers and therefore unless you have significantly above average git knowledge in your company it makes sense as a default strategy

2 comments

Coming from a completely different culture where the word 'engineer' still means something, I find this quite funny. If your 'engineers' just smash keys together until it seems to work somehow (which includes never bothering to learn the full potential of DVCS — one of our most important tools), they're not really engineers IMHO. Real ones know their tools (I don't pretend to be one and never call myself that).
That's not in-depth knowledge, that's basic usage. I don't have in-depth knowledge of git myself, most of its plumbing is an opaque black box for me. Less obvious but useful things like `--first-parent` are just one manpage reading session away. If your colleagues are unable to perform some basic rebases to squash away their WIP commits, you may want to help them learn how to use one of the most essential tools in their work. Everyone in your team will benefit.