I suspected I was living in a Dilbert cartoon and wrote a Ruby script to find out.

This is the gem's output. It pretty much confirmed my hunch:

It uses Rubocop and Git for the numeric analysis. I didn't have a way to measure bugs produced per developer. So the gem uses the Metrics "cops" as a proxy for bugginess.

After I generated the chart, a pattern in one particular repo jumped out at me. So I coded an --add-column CLI option to add "static" info. (I know who's a contractor and who isn't.)

My take-away: it's not looking great for the consulting agency. I know most of us here don't use Rubocop output as the last word on code quality. For me, this strong reveled pattern is a hint that a deeper look is warranted.

It's entirely possible, of course, that the contractors are doing much different work than staff. Or, they code in some very professional way that happens to trigger the Metrics warnings—creating false positives. So far, though, I don't think that's the case.