[khazhoux]

Obviously not.

The goal is to measure people's results. It might occasionally take a relatively-long time to find a seemingly-simple solution. But if an engineer /always/ takes a long time to find every solution, and upon inspection the problems were not actually difficult, then you most likely have a low-productivity engineer on your hands.

[groone]

That sounds really subjective

[khazhoux]

Somewhat, but not entirely so. Managers can and should read git logs and bug tickets and design docs, and understand the architecture enough to have a reasonable sense of what the work entails. And managers should be engineers themselves and know that sometimes simple-looking work is actually very tricky… but at the same time it’s very unlikely that /every/ task looks like this.