> 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.
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
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?