Motivated by some recent M&A news and general productivity pressures in time of tight budgets, we present some anti-patterns to the use of engineering metrics and give an overview of how to use metrics for productivity insights instead. First, let us first start with what to avoid: 

Anti-Pattern to Engineering Metrics

Lines of code written: While lines of code can be a proxy metric for how much code you have to maintain (and therefore costs to incur), it has been proven to be a terrible metric for productivity. This shouldn’t need much explanation, but: Output does not necessarily equate to the outcome. Different programming languages have different verbosity, and e.g., just including some open-source packages or pasting in some code from Stack Overflow does not make you more productive. And, of course, solving hard problems often does not require a lot of code but a lot of thinking, exploration, and collaboration.