It's a question that haunts engineering leaders, spawning an industry-wide obsession with metrics like lines of code written, pull request velocity, a

Why developer satisfaction is your best productivity metric

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2025-01-08 04:00:05

It's a question that haunts engineering leaders, spawning an industry-wide obsession with metrics like lines of code written, pull request velocity, and deployment frequency. We've built dashboards, created frameworks, and spent countless hours trying to quantify developer output.

At GitHub, we've learned through scaling our own engineering teams that the best indicator of productivity isn't found in commit counts or deployment metrics---it's in developer satisfaction. Happy developers don't just write better code; they solve harder problems, collaborate more effectively, and build better products.

In this post, we'll explore why developer satisfaction isn't just a feel-good metric---it's a powerful tool for measuring and improving engineering productivity.

Despite the tech industry's obsession with metrics and optimization, there's a striking paradox at its heart: most organizations have no systematic way to measure developer productivity.