Yes it's true. Managers love metrics. Some managers may even attend clandestine weekend meetings to come up with more useless numbers to apply to the work that developers do. As we know from the days of LOC (Lines Of Code), these fail to capture the value or productivity of developers and sometimes mismotivate developers.

There is a lighter side of metrics though. They do have a critical place in software development, however it's not for managers to measure their developers rather for developers to understand their code.

As a programmer I never had the pleasure of working on a team that had effective code reviews. In fact, I don't ever recall being in a code review. I certainly remember a lot of lip service being paid to the importance of code reviews, just never actually saw one. Maybe that was because of bad management, or maybe code reviews weren't as important as we thought, or maybe we tried and failed, or maybe we were having code reviews every day but they were so horribly unrecognizable that I just thought they were something else.