I can’t take credit for the origin of this phrase, but I have used it many times. For anyone not familiar with Github’s terminology a “pull” request is (in non-technical terms) a proposed change to some code that a reviewer can choose to accept, request changes to, or reject entirely. A restating of this phrase would be something like: “don’t just complain about something, try to solve it”, but that’s not nearly as catchy.

How to apply this phrase

If you’re working at a technology company in 2024, you probably have a large shared codebase (e.g. a monorepo). One giant advantage of this arrangement is that you have the power to go see how anything works, and you can suggest changes and improvements to almost anything.

If there is a small quirk in some tool that you’re using, or something you want to tweak in a user interface, try giving yourself a time-boxed amount of time (probably no more than 15 minutes) to go find it in the codebase and fix it.

If you manage to fix it, send the team that owns the feature a pull request about it! The team might not accept it, so don’t get too attached to these throw-it-over-the-wall fixes, but they will certainly follow up with you about it if you’ve taken the time to try to fix it yourself.

After your 15 minutes is up, if you did not successfully fix the issue but still think it’s important, then you can go tell the responsible team your complaint. Since you’ve dug in, you’ll have more empathy with the team about why it might not be a simple fix to perform. It might also be useful to share what you tried to do to let them build off of your work.

Gotchas

You must take care to not overuse this expression, or use it with the wrong tone; when used incorrectly, you might sound like a defensive jerk! I strongly prefer to use this expression as a suggestion when the complaint is about something I’m not directly responsible for, since if I am responsible for it, it can easily be interpretted as not being receptive of feedback.