Comment by eesmith

> I'd expect exceptional programmers to do unusually well on most metrics.

Not if they game the metrics, as a way to force change.

A classic example of an exceptional programmer doing worse on a (bad) metric is at https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... , titled "-2000 Lines Of Code".

"Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. ... Bill Atkinson ... thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. ... [He] made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code. ... when it was time to fill out the management form ... he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. ... after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."