Massive problem in tech: Valuing easily-quantifiable metrics for productivity over "softer" forms of productivity. Current tech culture reminds me of a random idiot who makes claims like "Xavi wasn't much of a midfielder because he rarely scored goals".
On one small project I was on (6 person team), we had a guy -- we'll call him Carl -- who was right at the bottom of the pile of commits. I mean, maybe 20-30 over the course of a 6 month project. From an earlier collaboration, I happened to know that he was a very good programmer, but he wrote practically zero code for this project. And Carl wasn't that popular with our bull-in-a-china-shop director, who claimed that Carl was dead weight slowing our fast-paced team down. He constantly asked the rest of us what Carl was "contributing".
So, after months of pressure, Carl "left" for a separate team as the project wound down, in spite of our vociferous appeals to management to keep him on. He quit a few months later.
Why were we so desperate to keep him?
Because Carl was the glue that kept the group working so productively. He managed the egos, kept focus on the goal, and fostered respect for everybody on the team. He intervened during technical and interpersonal disputes. He was calm and quiet and rational. During design discussions, when the more outspoken members of the team were trying to ram through their visions of the world (guilty!), he would bring brilliantly insightful and cogent questions about the long-term and medium-term ramifications of said designs. He was an unofficial liaison to our internal customers. He volunteered to break bad news to management when there was a delay, but deferred to other members of the team when it came time to claim credit for our progress.
Carl was, in short, our unofficial PM, and a damn good one. He realized that his social skills were more valuable to the team than his technical skills. But his contributions weren't valued by management because they weren't as visible as our commits. Our team fell apart in a matter of months after he left, as we quickly became overwhelmed by all the stupid shit -- and toxic politics -- he had deftly absorbed and deflected. We wasted two of those last months working on a feature that he had opposed, only for none of our clients to use that feature upon release. Just as he had predicted.
In general, all the things he brought to the table -- humility, empathy, patience, foresight, listening, respect, selflessness -- are the sorts of pro-social traits that tech companies (and especially SV tech companies) aggressively select against, in spite of the fact that they are precisely the kinds of traits that lead, in my experience, to far greater productivity.
The current culture is borderline toxic. In all the talk of "10x" programmers, people seem eager to overlook that a 1x programmer might have a 10x positive impact on their team in other ways.