The worst programmer I know

I sometimes wonder if developers should do an end run around all this bullshit and come up with and start measuring management productivity metrics.

I dont see a downside to doing this.

Reminds me of an anecdote about Bell Labs. Someone calculated who the most productive employees were (based on things like patents received), and found that many of them would eat lunch with the same person. That person wasn't individually very productive, but he would always ask thoughtful, compelling questions that in turn made his coworkers measurably more productive.

How would coming up with good metrics for "management" be any easier than coming up with good metrics for "programming"?

At least programming has some verifiable realities that can be witnessed objectively by multiple observers. Not that such things are often used on "metrics", but they could be.

The quality of someone's management is hard to assess from outside, much less objectively verify. Has your manager increased or decreased your productivity today? Was it necessary that they do so for a larger goal you're not considering? Were they just power tripping?

"Hey, boss who can fire me, I just thought you should know that we on the team have started keeping metrics. I want you to know that your 'times you made the only girl on the team uncomfortable with a sexist joke' metric is unusually high this month, and your 'unblocked the team by speeding up an external request' metric is 0 for this month, down from 3 times last month"

Let me know if you find any downsides.

Anyway, management will of course argue that developers under them are incapable of seeing everything management does. After all, management's job is to shield developers from other managers, so if the developers think all the managers at the company are worthless, that's actually a sign of how well management did their job of shielding each other's teams from each other.

Well, I like the story here, but it's kinda against a bit of a strawman. Don't get me wrong, I'm not losing the overall point of the piece, a point I agree with, but that said a metrics focussed manager could have simply added an "adjunct" label to the stories and had this "worst programmer" add themselves to stories as the non-lead developer.

Ultimately the best way of measuring programmer productivity is by the assessments of the programmers on the team. This isn't as easy as it seems. For example, I once worked on a team where the best Heroku guy just had the absolute wrong idea about "easily understandable python code" since he would prefer to raise and catch an exception instead of rely on a built-in to test attribute existence or type compatibility. But nobody could get around large scale Heroku deployments like this guy. The juniors understand this nuance less well than seniors do, but even so, it does sorta come out in the wash. Your team does know its best people and they're usually happy to say it in a private one on one.