Worst Software Metrics

I agree that such a metric exists which is the same as the desired outcome. Such a metric does, in fact, exist. The metric IS the desired outcome. The problem comes when you try to write a generic, reusable formula that describes the desired outcome and attempt to implement a system that teams can use to apply the metric to their work. It ends up being effectively impossibly complex to create the formula, and even if you could create it, it would take longer it than it would to write the software that it's supposed to measure.

What we're left with is 'the best that we can do', and that's what we have been doing. We absolutely COULD make more accurate(yet still very imperfect) metrics that more closely model the actual goals of a project by simply including more factors(bugs, readability of code, difficulty of feature, size of feature/LOC, number of modules/classes that the code spans or communicates with in some way, how easy-to-read and easy-to-modify the existing code that needs to be altered is, etc times 1,000,000). But adding more factors just makes the metric exponentially more complex and difficult to implement. I'm sure people have tried using way more fine-grained metrics than what we have now - but nobody knows about them because nobody uses them anymore because they weren't worth the time and effort.

So we're kind of left with what we have, which in my opinion as a software engineer is definitely not good enough. Which is pretty bad, because by 'good enough' I just mean better than doing nothing at all.

The only problem here that can be solved, and therefore that is worth solving, is why these metrics are still commonly enforced despite being counterproductive. Obviously managers managers-of-managers feel a need to have some nice, concrete, objective numbers that they can look at to see how well developers and teams are doing. The people pushing these metrics are often the ones who have no other way of understanding what exactly developers are doing, either because they've never written software before or because they are too far removed from the level of the guys actually writing code to pay attention to what they're actually doing beyond just looking at a single number.

It makes sense for managers who don't know what engineers are doing to seek out a different way to measure their performance and progress. The solution isn't do nothing, and it's not story points or any of that BS. But what are the alternatives?

The only one I can think of is, don't put a manager in a position to manage individual developers if he/she is unable to understand what those individuals are even doing. Having an experienced senior engineer with the right skillset for management directly in charge of every team is amazingly valuable in my opinion. It's also vital that those higher up on the ladder are able to trust these manager-engineers, who are basically acting as an abstraction layer between the regular engineers and higher management.

A lot of teams already have this in the form of a senior engineer or software architect, my team has one and it works out amazingly. We all feel that doing a good job will be recognized and rewarded, problems are easily identified and addressed, we get things done very quickly, everyone gets along, and there's not a lot of pressure.

This is just my own single anecdotal experience and it has worked out very well but I'm aware it may not always be that way, so I'm interested in hearing others thoughts/experiences/solutions