[vii]

Being considered the go-to person means you are first in line to make small tweaks (and config changes in code).

This increases the change count.

If there is a review process where another engineer has to approve work, this exacerbates the gap, as the go-to person can get their reviews done quickly. If they're trusted, the reviews might not be thorough.

This increases the rate at which changes go in.

These and other factors suggest that it's hard to split cause and effect here. Being seen as productive increases change count :)

[freshhawk]

This also seems to be labeling people as "top performers" based on how much code they get done.

And then measuring how many commits they do and wondering why those are correlated? Even besides the good reasons you point out ... this seems very obvious.

Also, my experience has shown that smaller commits are easier to work with so people with experience tend to make more smaller commits. This also seems to be fairly widely talked about.

[diogenesjunior]

With GitHub's API, commits are so easy to game. I'd never use commits as a measure of how good of a programmer someone is. I made a Python script in 15 minutes to commit to a repo every second, and the repo is sitting at about 750,000 commits.

[geek_at]

are you the guy hosting that "time as a service" github repo? Where the time is always updated and you can curl the json or whatever and get the time?

[diogenesjunior]

Nope, not at all. Do you have any links to what you're talking about?