> 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?
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?
> earned dollars
Someone who isn't fixing a lot of bugs or implementing flashy new features but is providing good mentoring to the team, writing onboarding documentation, helping them understand the large-scale ramifications of their changes, etc., is essentially invisible to "metrics" yet providing a vital role.