
Measuring Developers by Tickets Closed Is the New Lines of Code
We’ve been here before. Twenty years ago, managers thought they’d cracked the code: count the lines of code developers write, and boom—instant productivity measurement. It was simple, objective, and completely wrong. Lines of code became the programming equivalent of paying soldiers by the bullet fired—quantity over sense. Yet here we are in 2026, making the exact same mistake with a fresh coat of paint. We’ve just swapped “lines of code” for “tickets closed,” and everyone’s acting like we invented something revolutionary....



