Git: The Conversation We Shouldn

How endless debates about version control workflows are stealing our most precious resource: time to actually build things

There's a conversation happening in development teams worldwide, every single day. It starts innocently enough: someone opens a pull request, and then it begins. Should we rebase or merge? To squash or not to squash? What about our branching strategy? Are we doing GitFlow right? Should we switch to trunk-based development?

And just like that, three developers and a tech lead are spending 45 minutes in a meeting room with a whiteboard, drawing branch diagrams and debating the philosophical merits of different git workflows. Meanwhile, the feature that customers actually need remains unfinished.

The Git Debate Industrial Complex

We've created an entire industry around discussing git workflows. There are conference talks, blog posts, heated Twitter threads, and countless hours of team meetings dedicated to perfecting our version control strategy. But here's the uncomfortable truth: these conversations are stealing time from the work that actually matters.

Don't get me wrong, version control is important. But the difference between a rebase-heavy workflow and a merge-commit approach isn't going to make or break your product. Your customers don't care if your git history looks like a beautiful linear progression or a chaotic web of merge commits. They care about whether your software solves their problems.

The Productivity Paradox

Every minute spent debating git workflows is a minute not spent writing code that delivers value, testing features that users will actually touch, fixing bugs that are causing real problems, understanding customer needs, improving system performance, or refactoring technical debt.

We've somehow convinced ourselves that optimizing our git workflow is a form of productivity, but it's actually a form of procrastination. It's sophisticated procrastination: the kind that feels important and technical—but procrastination nonetheless.

The Myth of the Perfect Workflow

Here's what I've learned after years of witnessing these debates: there is no perfect git workflow. Every approach has trade-offs. Rebase gives you a clean history but can be confusing for junior developers. Merge commits preserve context but create a messier timeline. Squashing creates tidy commits but loses granular history. GitFlow provides structure but adds complexity. Trunk-based development enables fast iteration but requires discipline.

The quest for the "right" workflow is like searching for the perfect text editor or the ideal programming language. It's an endless rabbit hole with no definitive answer, because the answer depends on your team, your project, and your constraints.

The Real Cost of Endless Debates

When we spend time debating git workflows, we're not just wasting the time in the meeting. We're creating:

Analysis paralysis: Teams become afraid to commit (pun intended) to any workflow because they might choose the "wrong" one.

Bikeshedding: Complex technical decisions get ignored while everyone has opinions about commit messages and branch naming.

Onboarding friction: New team members spend their first week learning your custom git workflow instead of learning your codebase.

Tool worship: We start optimizing for our tools instead of our outcomes.

The Other Conversations We Shouldn't Have

Git isn't the only culprit. The software development world is full of debates that masquerade as productive discussions. There's the eternal tabs versus spaces war, where teams spend hours debating whitespace when they could just pick one and use a formatter. There are naming convention discussions that go on for meetings when following the language standard would solve everything. Code review sessions turn into nitpicking exercises focused on style rather than logic. Framework wars rage on while features remain unshipped. Architecture astronauting flourishes as teams over-engineer for problems they don't actually have.

Each of these conversations follows the same pattern: high engagement, strong opinions, and minimal impact on actual outcomes.

A Better Approach

Instead of debating the perfect git workflow, try this approach: Pick something simple that your least experienced team member can understand. Document it briefly in a README and move on. Time-box any workflow discussions to a maximum of 15 minutes. Measure what actually matters like cycle time, bug rates, and customer satisfaction rather than commit graph beauty. Only iterate and change your workflow when it's causing real, measurable problems.

The Developer's Dilemma

Here's the thing that makes this particularly challenging: developers are problem-solvers by nature. We see a messy git history and we want to fix it. We encounter a workflow friction and we want to optimize it. This instinct serves us well when we're debugging code or designing systems, but it becomes a liability when we apply it to every aspect of our development process.

Not every problem needs to be solved. Not every process needs to be optimized. Sometimes "good enough" is actually good enough.

What Should We Talk About Instead?

If we're going to have conversations about our development process, let's make them count by focusing on user feedback and what customers are actually saying about our product. Let's discuss system performance and identify our bottlenecks. We should talk about code quality and whether we're writing maintainable, testable code. Team velocity matters, are we delivering value consistently? Technical debt deserves attention, what shortcuts are slowing us down? Learning opportunities should be on the table, what skills would help us deliver better software?

These conversations can actually improve outcomes. They focus on impact, not process.

Conclusion

Git is a tool. Like any tool, it should fade into the background and let us focus on the work that matters. The moment our tools become the focus of our conversations, we've lost sight of why we're here: to build software that solves real problems for real people.

Your git workflow doesn't define your team's success. Your ability to consistently deliver valuable software does. So let's stop debating the perfect way to manage our code and start focusing on writing code worth managing.

The conversation about git workflows? It's time to stop having it.