I think your take on how I would have used Github is a bit misunderstood. I meant more that I could see if this person was contributing to other projects, or ju

I think your take on how I would have used Github is a bit misunderstood. I meant more that I could see if this person was contributing to other projects, or just generally what sorts of projects they worked on. Certainly, pay-per-LOC is not even remotely intelligent. And not everything has to scale. I think the other problem that your hourly pay situation doesn't address (aside from what Volundr mentioned), is that it robs the person of their ability to actually get better at what they do by substituting valuable expansion time with labor time. Most people don't grow in their jobs alone. Most companies don't want their employees to grow. Learning, trying, failing, and mastering take time that companies don't want to spend money on. This is why passion time is so critical: It lets the employee do new things, and new things make them better and smarter. If I had never taken my off-work time to do my own iOS apps, I would never have learned native iOS development, seeing as my company wouldn't have lost out 3 or so months on teaching me. My passion for software is the only thing that made me better, and the company got a lot of value from it as I brought new coding principals and patterns along with me that I applied to make my work software better as an indirect result, but there's no structures in place to make sure I don't become disenchanted with my employer as I grow beyond it.