> You cannot tell your selection committee 'I refactored code and that'll save us probably 100 bugs in the next year, times 2 hours per bug, at $300 per man hou

> You cannot tell your selection committee 'I refactored code and that'll save us probably 100 bugs in the next year, times 2 hours per bug, at $300 per man hour, a $60000 savings.'. You can't? Especially if you have documentation of the bugs that were previously happening, this is very solid evidence. Another one I've seen, "This would cause a weekly page a 2 am, and half the time ended up being an all day problem that needed to be put out. This no longer happens and is worth $X of engineering time." I would agree though that second example "built a feature that saved $60000" is a stronger statement because it's so much more quantifiable to the businesses bottom line. To go back to my original point though, we all (not just managers, but the entire team) should constantly be pushing to get ourselves to objective measure. The more subjective measures are used ("I refactored this code which is now easier to read") the more you allow the bad politics I outlined earlier where a boss and his buddy team up to get raises. It's very toxic and should be avoided at all costs.