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> No heuristic is perfect, but it's fairly easy to quantify empirically from activity/records. Developers who are productive (actually write and ship large amounts of quality code) tend to be valuable and those that don't, aren't.

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li... ... large amounts of quality code? How many lines of code a week constitutes a large contribution?

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The most prolific people at my startup were doing 20k/month. The worst performers were doing 500/month. No, the people doing 500/month didn't compensate for it in other ways.

Of course this was a company that needed to build a product and enhance it to survive, not a pseudo-monopoly daycare.

Even up to a few hundred developers, its quite obvious who's a strong contributor and who isn't. The people who produce the most code are almost uniformly also the most theoretically strong/capable. Though there was a case where somebody was quite prolific but produced pretty poor/buggy code. It's obvious from how smooth the features they developed go when shipped to production.

In most workplaces you'll find that 80% of the results are produced by the top 20% of contributors

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