Comment by tpmoney

I don't think there are realistically any good "individual" productivity measures that work across a broad spectrum of employees, even when all of those employees are in the same role. Every team I've ever been a part of, even before being a developer has been made up of people that all contributed to the overall project in different ways. Imagine trying to measure all workers on a car assembly line by the number of screws they insert per day, or the number of welds they make per day. Anyone who's primary job on the line isn't inserting screws or making spot welds is instantly a low performer by this metric, and yet you can't assemble a complete car with only screws and welds. And it's worse I think in something like software development, where the specific way a team member contributes might be more nebulous. Very rarely do you hire someone just for their code review skills or the design capabilities. The team member that somehow always manages to recall the tiniest of details about the system that no-one else recalls from the feature work done 5 years ago is not exactly a skill you can find on a resume or even one you could build a good metric for even if you had hand tailored metrics for all employees.

And it's a hard problem to solve. I don't envy the job of anyone in management trying to figure out how to determine who (if any) of your employees is a drag on the team. Sometimes it's obvious and there are concrete problems, but other times it's just someone "everyone knows" is a drag, but without hard metrics, you're left with awful things like having employees stack rank each other.