> Counting lines of code, commits, changesets or any other simple metric will destroy your culture.
Counting them alone won't, but incentivizing people based on changesets will. IMO there are plenty of cases where counting LOC is useful to a manager. It's a discrete piece of data than can be combined with other data to make informed decisions as a manager.
It’s very high risk and low reward. I have heard of a very valuable employee quitting on the spot when they discovered their manager was doing this kind of analysis.
It has greatly demotivated me to learn that productivity was measured by commit count in one of the companies I worked in. Interestingly, I was the most "productive" engineer there at the time. Yet my code was garbage (no offence to garbage intended). This oxymoron showed me that there's no path for me to improve in that company and I soon left.
Nothing is just a discrete piece of data. If it even barely feeds into something that feeds into something that feeds into something that feeds into something that affects developers’ compensation, then it will get gamed.
Counting them alone won't, but incentivizing people based on changesets will. IMO there are plenty of cases where counting LOC is useful to a manager. It's a discrete piece of data than can be combined with other data to make informed decisions as a manager.