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Have they just started tracking “developer productivity” or do they also spend time on identifying good developers and enabling them to teach their skills?

If you want some form of rational decision when you develop a team, how else but with metrics do you make decisions?

Illusion of Control.

It's a terrible answer, in no small part because it's true.

How do you manage people when you're bad at managing people and can't/won't look at it? You manage safe, crisp, numbers instead.

Because as a business we seek efficiency. And how can we know if we're efficient if we can't measure output? It's only natural to want to get the most out of your dollar from expensive resources like developers.