> I'm not sure that's "easy to measure" since how do you know how many hours have been saved without doing it the "slow" way first?
Like I said, not always easy to boil down to a concrete number, but you can always find good proxies. Fixed a problem that caused service to trigger alarms in the middle of the night? Saved engineering hours. Wrote a library that several teams use? Saved engineering hours. Even your example, writing documentation, saves engineering hours.
> Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs [...]
How would you be able to do any of that if you're not doing meaningful work on the system?
Like I said, not always easy to boil down to a concrete number, but you can always find good proxies. Fixed a problem that caused service to trigger alarms in the middle of the night? Saved engineering hours. Wrote a library that several teams use? Saved engineering hours. Even your example, writing documentation, saves engineering hours.
> Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs [...]
How would you be able to do any of that if you're not doing meaningful work on the system?