Even so, tickets munched out or tasks completed is still "output" — sometimes you could provide more value by avoiding tickets that are not bringing benefits to customers or business, solving things customers need and not what they think they need, suggesting solutions which are 5% of work yet provide 90% of the value, etc.
I never worked as an engineer like that: I always wanted to influence what I am being asked to do (I started with free software communities, moved to an open source company, and only worked "proprietary" work the last decade), and especially, challenging it when I was confident it made no sense, or when there were obvious improvements for the end user experience at lower, equal, or slightly bigger cost.
You can certainly be very productive by doing what you are told. I'd probably fail at that metric against many engineers, yet people usually found me very valuable to their teams (I never asked if it was 1x or 2x or 0.5x compared to whatever they perceive as average).
The last few years, I am focused on empowering engineers to be equal partners in deciding what is being done, by teaching them to look for and suggest options which are 10% of the effort and 90% of the value for the user (or 20/80, and sometimes even 1% effort for 300% the value). Because they can best see what is simple and easy to do with the codebase, so if they put customer hat on, they unlock huge wins for their team and business.
