I give the author full points for thinking through the problems and trying to mitigate the flaws, clearly he has significant experience and good intent.

At the end of the day though, his obsession with quantifying dev performance is doomed to failure. Goodharts Law can not be routed around by adding more metrics to capture all eng considerations. This can only work in a sanitized environment with low expectations and homogenous feature requests. In fast growing tech companies, there is far too much chaos and change for anything like this to approach an objective measure of what activity is producing value.

What I’ve learned over my decades a TL, EM, Director and CTO is that team performance has a human chemistry aspect to it where you need certain traits present, including a healthy dose of intrinsic motivation to do good work, and enough judgement on what that means in relationship to both short and long term business needs. Ultimately as a manager your only option to scale is to empower individuals as much as possible and relentlessly pursue and elevate those with the judgement and maturity to have more authority. Yes, it’s subjective, but there’s no faster way to kill the motivation of your top people than to reduce the output of their contextual reasoning to a metric. You’ve killed the golden goose while pursuing your control fantasy.