About 10 years ago, I realized all the best programmers I had worked with had something in common: they were fast. By that I mean that they moved quickly: we’d discuss a problem and an hour or two later they’d already have a patch ready or a prototype to show off.
It took me a while, but eventually I realized: they weren’t fast because they were great programmers, they were great programmers because they were fast.
Yeah, there’s several silly metrics for management to judge programmers. It’s mostly because management needs some oversimplification, because they have no clue what programmers do all day.
Most common one is “lines of code” (LoC) written in a day. Of course you’re making the company more money if you write more code. That’s your job after all, right? Right??? …Of course that punishes people who write efficient code. Who think first and then come up with a smaller, better to maintain version.
It’s similar with speed. But just tell the programmers what to do! It’s easy to get 80% the way with 20% the effort. That’s how it always works. Your programmers can do that, just write it into the project specification.