Hard truth: Some devs are WAY more productive
Hard truth: Some devs are WAY more productive.
As a consultant, I work with dozens of teams. I see massive differences in developer output.
Here's an example on the same team:
Dev 1: 45 PRs/month
Dev 2: 1 PR/month
I did code reviews. Dev 1 had higher code quality too.
And yes, stats can be gamed. So, I don't recommend managing based on stats. But when stats are wildly lopsided, there's often a root cause worth exploring.
In this case, the dev who completed 45 PRs had many PRs that were more complex than the 1 PR merged by the other dev.
A related law:
Price's law: 50% of the work is done by the square root of the number of employees.
So:
If you have 10 employees, 3 do 50% of the work.
If you have 100 employees, 10 do 50% of the work.
If you have 10k employees, 100 do 50% the work.
One more related principle:
"All models are wrong. Some are useful."
The number of PRs merged is a bad productivity metric when used alone. But it can be a relevant datapoint as part of a bigger picture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong