All to often there are invisible "heroes" who quietly fix issues, prevent bugs and makes sure everything runs smoothly. They are simply not as visible as someone who creates high profile features and firefight bugs introduced by their coding. From the management point of view they are hard workers that work late fixing issues.
Management can only recognize what they can see. The quiet dev who just makes things work is a huge value to the company, while the "bro" that master the political game gets all the recognition.
What metrics can they use that are not quickly gamed?