You could bake 45 pies in 1 hour, and they could all be terrible pies that can't be sold, and you could burn down half the bakery in the process. In the same w

You could bake 45 pies in 1 hour, and they could all be terrible pies that can't be sold, and you could burn down half the bakery in the process. In the same way, a developer could ship a bunch of features, but they could all be "half-baked" and a nightmare to maintain. You can inspect the pies made by your staff. Terrible pies that can’t be sold either look bad (misshapen, burnt, leaking) or taste bad (too sweet, not sweet enough, salty, over/undercooked). It’s not difficult to figure out. On the other hand, evaluating a developer’s productivity and quality of work would require a lot of code review which takes time and skill and also may require the developer to be present, wasting their time and lowering productivity. Push the review and eval process far enough and you really risk bringing down that developer to an unacceptably low level of productivity.