This is a personal area of interest for me. I think a lot of what you have described is flawed. It feels more like trying to systemize something that cannot be

This is a personal area of interest for me. I think a lot of what you have described is flawed. It feels more like trying to systemize something that cannot be systemized. One time I spent 6 months in a brutal migration of a critical system. Lines of code in production in those 6 months = 20 lines. By your measure, I did not accomplish much. But where exactly did my time go? It went in getting stakeholders together, performing significant experiments to identify the problem, performing more experiments to find solutions, carefully roll out the experiments in various production datacenter - often over weekends. The output? Migration completed. It was hard work, stressful and took a lot from me. But for a manager strictly follows your rubric, I was unproductive. And now, I get a poor performance rating. I would likely have to sink more time to produce tons of artifacts to prove that that rating was incorrect. Other engineers sees it. Learn to never take up hard problems ever. Just smash more lines of code to be safe. You have single handedly shot the success of engineering by having an uninformed performance review criteria.