Engineering Culture
6 min read

Your dev "productivity" metrics are broken (and here's the proof)

By Jaroslaw Michalik
Productivity
Metrics
Engineering Culture

Your dev "productivity" metrics are broken (and here's the proof)

Originally published on Impl — Jaroslaw Michalik's newsletter on engineering, AI, and building software that lasts.

Lines of code, commit counts, PRs merged per week — the usual dashboard of developer productivity measures activity, not outcomes, and it was already a weak proxy before AI-assisted coding made output even easier to inflate. Pushing teams to optimize those numbers harder doesn't produce better software; it produces better numbers.

Read the full post on Substack →