> Don't make this personal. I'm not attacking you.
I am sorry for the adjective, what I meant was "extremely incompetent". That is still harsh, but hopefully conveys my opinion regarding your grasp of management in a more objective manner. It's not meant to be personal, I would say the same thing about someone attempting to use the OCaml compiler to run a Python program, and telling me that's how they do things at their daily job.
> Are you actually taking the opposite extreme position, that a developer's LOC tells you absolutely nothing about their productivity? That there's not even a correlation or a hint of a connection, in the general case?
I am taking the slightly less strong stance that a developer's LOC tells you no more about their productivity than any other random metric, e.g. the number of lines they type into Slack, the number of bugs they file in the internal bugtracker, or how many geek jokes they made that month.
> As a manager, if one person on the team is committing several times a week, and their code is, even at a glance, non-trivial, meanwhile another developer merged 3 times in the last month and the git diffs are 20 lines each, would you say that the 15 LOC a week (or whatever small number) shouldn't be a major concern that I should look into?
Is this person engaging at all with their teammates? Have they been active on design docs or architecture? Have they been responding to queries from sales engineers? (a lot of time at an old job was literally telling Sales "yes, our product can do that"). Have they been maybe going through a big life change?
Without all of these, it's not possible to get a complete picture of why there is a problem. And a lot of them are more specific and better questions to ask than "how many lines were in the diff?"
That is the crux of why I think manager who use LOC as a metric are incompetent managers. They have and project to others a simplistic view of "developer in, code out".
> he refused to accept the concept that he needed to deliver more than a couple of trivial python commits a month to justify his $250K/year salary (long story, I didn't hire him).
Since you have shown precisely this in your post (e.g. you didn't say anything about his lack of design or documentation or engagement with teammates; all of which I would certainly expect at that level), I think you need to reexamine your worldview, or at least the way in which you present it.