That tracks latency, but not throughput. Sure, a programmer may get a given ticket out the door 2x faster, but they may create 3x as much technical debt that wi

That tracks latency, but not throughput. Sure, a programmer may get a given ticket out the door 2x faster, but they may create 3x as much technical debt that winds up being addressed as separate tickets. That's a useful skill if you need one particular feature urgently for a deadline, but less useful for steady-state development. While I agree that there can be or at least seem to be that overall difference in productivity between people, utilizing a single metric to make that conclusion is simplifying a much more complex issue. Or a senior dev may wind up only getting a few tickets done, but it's because they're dealing with meetings and planning to determine the correct course of action for a project that may take a month or more. Or they may be a useful 'repository of knowledge' for the rest of the team, and spend a lot of their time enabling multiple other people to be more effective than they would be otherwise.