Assuming you can even measure this. How do you arbitrarily assign value produced by a dev vs produced by marketing vs produced by company synergies (could the dev really create 1 million in value without all those other people?).

I've long felt that the best devs should be building tools for other devs. The lower in the product pipeline the better, because that's where they can affect the most people, but it seems impossible to measure when you're talking about hard numbers.

E.g. in a large enough organization, if a good dev can make all your other devs even 1% more efficient, the value they just created will blow that $1 million figure out of the water. That dev producing "$1 million dollars in value" for your product owes much of that value to the devs that are creating tools for them to use, among other things.

The same line of thought can be put to CEOs. How do we know a CEO was responsible for a big bump in stock prices? Maybe the marketing team hit gold this year, the developers/engineers put out something truly game changing, or the entire market is just on an upswing and the company is doing better in spite of itself.

Yep, and then the follow up is just as difficult...is this dev not delivering value because she's not a good dev, or because those above her aren't giving her opportunities in high value projects?

"Am I a bad CEO or does my company just stink"

Who is the one person in charge of making the company not stink?

It's true that they could theoretically fire everyone, but practically speaking? They inherit the employees, culture, customers, vendors, and physical plant. It's (remotely) possible that Marissa Meyer is the world's best CEO, but she chose to play against a stacked deck when she went to Yahoo.

Every new CEO in a big company seems to decimate the employees anyway. Why none fires the right 10%?

Yes, you have a point, but getting on a failing company and failing does not reflect as bad as succeeding on such a company would look good. The only negative contribution Yahoo gave to Marissa Meyer CV was that badly managed data leak that is making every news.

In some cases, but in many cases its easy to see who is contributing above whom.

The problem really is at the level of a programmer politics is at play, given a whole lot of more number of people fight for fewer resources.