Managers of firms care about impact of financials. They don’t care about the metrics you are measuring / gaming. Ultimately all ‘progress’ has to show in the cash flows.

Are you taking more cost reduction projects and more revenue-generating projects? Are you actually delivering? Are customers perceiving you to be as trusted as before? Etc. are the only things that matter. ‘Show me the money’.

To me this is akin to the discussion re. Scrum, agile etc. Who cares? Show me the money.

At some point the price will rise. But the value has to have risen for existing buyers to be ok with that - but can they perceive the value? Hmmm difficult to tell. Benchmarks are not an objective way to measure that.

In the long run google is most likely to acquire a serious cost advantage given their level of vertical integration.

And frankly? That’s the best outcome. Code monkeys (in my view that’s an individual who writes out code just to complete a jira ticket) are a liability. Not only that but each additional person you have in an org means more noise creation.

If this forces the code monkeys to level up to compete… again a good thing.

The code base should not be elongated nor complicated. I’m not even a SWE by trade, rather a CEO, and this is my preferred outcome.