Literally the way to "manage" developers is to enable them to do good work, and then get the hell out of their way. The git logs, uptime, and slack messages are all the records you need for evals.
edit: fixed autocorrects
I mean, looking through the git logs means you look at code contributions. If you're a software engineer, that's kind of, ya know, your entire jobs. You can get a lot from looking at someone's contributions, especially in code or documentation or slack responses. Volume doesn't mean shit though, that's the trick.
> Might as well replace managers with a bot.
Yes, please.
Based on having studied lots and lots of open source projects, I can say volume has a very strong correlation with experience. The more people contribute, the more likely they have been contributing for a long time. A novice contributing a lot to me, can be a sign they are extremely good or they are trying to game the system or they don't know what they are doing and are constantly fixing previous mistakes.
As a manager they create perverse incentives especially if you have a high performing team (which you want to have) that all deserves a promotion but a limited budget. The incentive is to keep that low performer around so you have the budget to promote the others.
It's a systematized way for management to shoot itself in the foot. But for whatever reason we think something must be wrong if we're not giving and getting report cards at the end of the year. Waste of time and counter-productive.
I tried a lot and I mean a lot of ways to see if we could use git commits to help us better understand productivity, but I've found commits by themselves lacks a lot of context. Especially since some commits may never be merged.
What I've personally found so far, is that using pull requests is a very good way to help us understand development effort. By looking at pull requests, like the following for cockroach:
https://oss.gitsense.com/insights/github?t=crc-insights&tb=a...
it is much easier to grok what everybody is working on or has worked on. Having studied a lot of open source projects, it is kind of shocking how some developers can move and manage so much.
As a side note, if you are wondering what the lightning bolt icon is for, it means another pull request is modifying a similar file. The left arrow means the pull request has a file that is not up to date with the target branch.