I'm a VPE at a small-ish org (30 devs or so, currently), and I regularly skim through commit history and keep an eye on various technical chat (we're fully remote, so there's lots of chat). I don't think I spend more than 15 mins per week looking at git history, but that's very informative -- it is not enough to make robust decisions but it is good enough to spot issues once in a while. (I have written my fair share of code in the past, so that helps.) So it's like going to a book shop, reading two pages from a book and deciding whether I like the style or not.
Full disclosure: I'm trying to find a way to use development insights to help us develop software better, together.
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:
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.
