Counting tickets or lines of code misleads; the piece argues that engineering impact belongs at the team level, using outcome-based metrics, health signals, DORA data, and calibrated managers instead of individual productivity scores.
Engineering managers who try to rank individual engineers by tickets closed or lines written are chasing a mirage. Charity shares a personal story of becoming a ticket-closing machine for a remote sysadmin job, only to see how the metric-driven approach bored him and rewarded the wrong behavior. The core argument is that any job that can be reduced to simple counts can be automated away, and that creative professional work resists such reduction.
The alternative is to measure what matters: team-level outcomes, health metrics, and the four DORA signals-deployment frequency, lead time from merge to deploy, change failure rate, and mean time to restore. These give a realistic view of engineering productivity and efficiency without turning engineers into interchangeable cogs. Managers need to be technical enough to judge impact, calibrate reviews, and protect engineers from gaming metrics or political games.
Charity recommends a mix of outcome-based management, team health tracking, lightweight ladder reviews, and managers who constantly interrogate their own biases. By shifting focus from individual counts to team impact and DORA data, leaders can justify resource allocation, reward true contribution, and maintain morale while avoiding the pitfalls of metric-gaming and burnout.
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