I think the point the OPs was making is you cannot store up miles on Monday that you can then release Wednesday. You can with commits / stashes.
And that distorts behaviour
And that distorts behaviour
It’s called bias and its various types.
Even without gamefication I am guilty of storing up commits on "productive" days because I am conscious I may not have the same output the next day.
Yikes, yeah I forget some people have that type of workplace that isn't necessarily result driven. If that is the case and does get someone escorted at least there's a chance they'll end up somewhere more engaging.
Personally I find streaks are powerful motivators. If this were going to affect my work negatively it would probably be something like "not resting adequately."
You would be foolish to not have a little dry powder in your stashes. Maybe get a week or so ahead and commit fixes from 5 days back, so that if you hit a gnarly bug today you have five days to fix it for real and your streak is not affected.
There is no simple metric for "doing quality work" and any management that is not "i will sit down and read the code and understand it" is not real management.
And this does not scale. And so quality, creative work does not scale. Hence clusters. And senior staff engineers.
Oh and btw, staff engineers are the executives in software lead companies. any non-coding layers on top should be viewed as financiers - with some interesting organisational implications