[tharkun__]

In order for these metrics to have even a tiny tiny chance of not being completely gamed (even unintentionally) you'd have to define a rigorous formula of weighted metrics that take things like one of my siblings mentioned into account (did your 1000 lines create a regression or 5 and mine didn't? Code quality? Lots of review comments that took forever to debate and resolve?). And that's assuming you could actually measure those things properly. Was that comment a valid one regarding you missing quality guidelines or was it someone trying to game your metrics negatively so that he'd look better?

I think it's impossible to create something like that and it'd be very very bureaucratic and still prone to gaming. I think having something 'in between' is the best approach. You still allow a manager to interpret these things together with you but the manager should give you a guideline for what to look out for. We can use these metrics to inform decisions about performance but it's completely counter productive to simply have a few metrics where you have to hit specific numbers.

PR throughput? No problem, I'll form a clique of a bunch of people that OK each others tiny PRs. This will result in so much overhead that we won't actually get much done, piss off other team members, create a hell of basically unusable commits, make it more likely that code quality suffers because nobody has any chance of having an overview of what you're doing overall and you will likely create regressions that developed over multiple commits and would've been caught otherwise because let's face it, each unit test you write is its own PR. You say obviously you won't get through with this because your manager is supposed to stop that? Well he can't if we just want a completely objective and metrics driven approach!

With the hybrid approach, you know from your manager that PR throughput is important not at the expense of quality and other things. You want small PRs for certain reasons but not at all costs. There is no exact formula because no two situations are exactly the same. Of course bias comes, of course bad managers make this bad. So does a completely "objective" metrics driven environment in which you play the metrics game. There is no perfect solution.