[jrumbut]

People say that no metric works but I think almost any metric works, for example PR count.

You, a human being, would never actually confuse the engineers with 0 PRs because they spent the last month playing online poker with the engineers with 0 PRs because you entrusted them with developing an automated deployment system for a legacy application and starting a mentorship program.

Many metrics will spot the outliers. But what is the business value of knowing when an engineer rated 82.13 vs 84.51?

[sam0x17]

Yeah but what about the highly skilled employee who spends 90% of their time playing online poker and spends 10% of their time producing output on-par with other people in the org that work 100% of the time. There is almost always one of these in any given org.

[januzis]

I would actually be OK with it, as long as I can objectively say that even though someone is slacking most of the time, he/she is very productive in short bursts, so the overall productivity is on par with the team average.

The problem is that if you don't have an objective approach to evaluating productivity, all sorts of biases come in, e.g. if I see someone coming to the office at 11am and leaving at 4pm, I would subjectively rate their productivity lower, even though objectively the results might be the same as for someone who comes in early, and leaves late.

[Smithalicious]

Well are they getting paid 10 times as much as the others?

[januzis]

Yes, the extreme cases are easy to spot, but the nominal cases are not that minuscule, more like one developer being twice more productive than the other, which, I feel, should be recognized and rewarded accordingly.