It's hard to judge by commits alone because your public profile doesn't reflect contributions to private repos, which for many of us is our 9-5 work. I look for

It's hard to judge by commits alone because your public profile doesn't reflect contributions to private repos, which for many of us is our 9-5 work. I look for meaningful open source contributions or a side project the engineer is passionate about, and within those repos I usually skim for code style but I check commit messages and documentation. (I don't want to work with an engineer who writes commit messages like "Misc shit WIP" or "lol 3 AM", and I don't want to maintain code written by someone whose README.md is blank or a placeholder. Part of this is the more I learn about software engineering, the more I realize that making code intelligible to other people on the team is so much more important than elegant code that only the author understands. If you're optimizing for elegance, you're trading a few bytes of compressed storage space for hours of an engineer's on-the-clock time trying to figure out what the heck you did.)