"[manager] didn't want to assume any blame for this"

This happens depressingly often.

"6 monts working on the equivalent of 2 weeks of estimation points"

It's really the fault of the manager for not changing something after the first 3 weeks of this.

This exact thing has happened to me before - you have to be strong enough to stand up for yourself and communicate the real problem or else, yeah, no one will want to take responsibility and it ALWAYS falls back on the dev team.

Sometimes it's tough to be that ass and say "hey, these weren't estimated properly PM!"...but if it's your job or theirs...

It sounds like justification for a decision made for less quantitative reasons.

Managers don't say, "So let's see who's the worst performer... it's Tom! Weird, he seems to be one of my best developers. Oh, well! The metrics say he's the worst. Off to fire Tom!"

You don't know many people who worked for Microsoft? They would let go the bottom 10% of their staff every year.

"Best to Worst Ranking" is the most toxic and destructive environments.

Manu Cornet famous organization chart is the best example of this. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/%22Org_c...

I was under the impression that those rankings were created through a series of let's-sort-everyone meetings rather a pedantic application of metrics.

Yes they are, you are right. My company does them too, somewhat.

If you have to let go 20% of your staff, how do you do it? You have to rank people...

  It sounds like justification for a decision made for less quantitative reasons.

Yes. And the perception of objectivity from the first two points (of the parental article) helps in hiding this.

Not in general, but I'm sure there are some that might.

"successfully escaped" is probably more accurate than "forced to quit"

It does. I've worked at two places that implemented the first two items in one degree or another. One place my manager assigned me a project to automate the commit counter for each developer and wanted to implement a standard template for the commit message developers would be required to use and that could be used to identify the particular feature or project so that commits / dev / project could be measured.

Software development in the Bay Area and other tech hubs with similar (or aspiring to be similar) company profiles can be depressing.