I used to work for a company that started using Gitprime to measure developer productivity. Gitprime would show a nice dashboard with stack ranked employees based on their git commits. Besides the obvious effect that it had on cooperation (you don’t want to help another developer lest they go before you in the stack rank) it had also funny effect on the code we wrote. For example, replacing old code with new code was penalized as “code churn”, so we had to write something like
if (false) {
// old code
}
// new code
In Golang projects we avoided pushing the vendors directory in one commit. Instead we had to strategically commit it piece by piece to satisfy “frequent small commits” metric that apparently is a signature of good developers.
I worked in a place where... regardless of what I did in branches, someone else would merge it and their name would be the only thing that showed up in the git metrics, because we only looked at the final 'main' branch. I'd looked at the 'develop' - where feature branches were merged before master - and I think I had something like 75%+ of the commits (over a 14 month period). But to look at the daily dashboard, I was doing nothing, and someone who was barely in weekly meetings for more than 15 minutes was doing 95% of the work.
I didn't particularly care, until people started looking at 'dashboard metrics' to see 'who's doing what'. I wasn't initially wanting visual credit, but when my contributions were effectively erased to the casual viewer, it pissed me off...
