No metric can or should be used in isolation to evaluate productivity. LOC is obviously very flawed, but to be completely honest it has been useful as part of

No metric can or should be used in isolation to evaluate productivity. LOC is obviously very flawed, but to be completely honest it has been useful as part of a heuristic for figuring out where something has gone wrong in a department (after applying basic heuristics like removing packaged code, vendored stuff, etc.) For example, if engineers are constantly committing and then deleting huge amounts of code (somewhat like this example) then it’s good to dive in and make sure you don’t have some issues creating that situation. This can range from product managers who aren’t validating their requests before engineers start working on them, to interpersonal issues such as unqualified juniors writing large amounts of buggy code and leaving it for senior engineers to fix. These metrics can also be warning signs that something has gone wrong. If an engineer’s number of commits have plummeted and LOC committed has gone way down, it’s a sign that you should ask more deeply how their work is going. I’ve had situations where programmers were being pulled into 20+ hours of meetings each week and being given weird research assignments from random C-level executives that took away all of their coding time. I’ve also had situations where people weren’t getting along with each other in private and DMs, and the first warning sign was that their contributions stalled. So while LOC and commit metrics can absolutely be misinterpreted in the wrong hands (e.g. as a proxy for laying off Twitter employees without trying to understand the context of their work) I’ve actually found them to be helpful as one of several early warning systems that something is going wrong with a team or project. Work with people for a while and it’s not hard to recognize their normal output and when it has stalled for unexpected reasons. Use that as a signal to start a conversation about how they’re doing.