I mean, what if you just don't?

at my company, raises have more to do with the financial situation of the company than subjective reviews (although we do have these, they just don't factor into compensation that much). if the company is doing well, everyone gets a nice raise. everyone gets the same percentage bonus every year which is calculated based on the entire company's performance. maybe this makes us unattractive for very competitive people, but it leads to a very cooperative environment. senior devs don't really have anything to lose by spending a few hours helping newer people, so they just do it.

Well, one reason is that without metrics, prejudice and bias is much more likely to win the day. "I just don't feel like they're doing a good job" is affected by all kinds of things unrelated to actual performance. At least having some metrics require you to think about whether that feeling is backed up by reality.

the theory is that high productivity people will not want to work there, as everyone else benefits from their excellence. If companies that retain these high productivity people perform better than companies that don't, evolutionary pressure will force these egalitarian companies out.

I think this theory may be true in some fields like hedge funds or heavy sales performance based businesses.

In software, I am not sure high productivity people care about this issue, as long as their compensation is high enough.

> high productivity people care about this issue, as long as their compensation is high enough.

That circles back to the original problem of how do you identify the high productivity people to give them high compensation. It works when the person spending the money is close enough to evaluate employee performance. But when it's some middle manager spending Zuckerburg's money you run into the agent/principle problem. The managers will do what's best for them (raises for everyone!) and not the enterprise.

I think high productivity people by definition cause everyone* else to benefit from their excellence.

So high productivity people who don't want everyone else to benefit are a bit of an oxymoron.

(* or at least most others)

LeBron James wants his whole team to succeed, but he still expects to be paid the most.

If you can afford LeBron, great!

If you can find a dev who can do for your company what LeBron can do for the Cavs/Heat/Lakers, great!

The reality is that you should be shooting for Shane Battier.

Being productive and not blocked is all some people want. Some might want to do less. And some might want to feel like they are the mvp. Michael Jordan didn't mail it in because Scotty was sitting at home.

How is obsessive focus on metrics making anything more fair? Even if you have metrics, choosing which ones are important still ends up being subjective, and the metrics are usually incomparable between projects. So the metrics alone don't tell anything useful and can still be easily gamed to make the manager's preferred employees look good and disliked employees look bad.

Metrics are CYA insurance for managers to promote or PIP employees without getting into trouble with HR

Metrics don't mean it's fair it just means you're judging someone on a handful of numeric values rather than them as an individual. If you judged me on the metric of turning up on time I'd be doing appalling [0], yet I'm still one of the first people to be brought in on every critical project in the company.

Obviously metrics vs just manager instinct/observation will benefit and harm different people in different ways.

A combination would be better. But life isn't really fair or objective, end of the day I'd rather work with someone I like and can socialise with and know working with them is stress free (which means my work is better) and can be trusted to just do their thing even if their performance is lower than someone who's a pain to work with but maybe puts in more hours.

Making software is a combination of engineering + artistry, it's not flipping X burgers an hour, objective performance isn't important it's the contribution of the whole individual.

[0] : I did have a manager judge me on this before, all it meant was I'd stay up all night, go into work, sit there like a zombie doing close to nothing, go home then sleep. Doesn't matter if I was barely doing anything, by their bum on seat metric I was doing great.

I've been thinking about this recently, what if we're doing it all wrong? what if, instead of your manager giving their reports a review, and then also giving raises based on that we go with a more market-based approach. Hear me out:

Every year, and once a year, all the managers in the company submit bids to the employees that they want to work under them. Employees then select their favorite bid, and that becomes their new manager. Employees are free to accept/reject bids based on any criteria: Salary/PTO/On-call requirements, etc.

There's a company that does this and more:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252759

Hah, I think I heard of that company on a podcast, it may have inspired the idea

Let me ask you another question. How do you identify the additive employees from the multiplicative employees? You probably don’t want all multiplicative employees on a team, but you surely want some of them. How do you create metrics that don’t encourage too much of one or the other? How much is too much of one or the other?

The performance evaluations I've been through claim to be evaluating how an employee does vs expectations. That doesn't demand comparing workers to each other.

In theory, you have a list of things to check for each category of performance. If you tick enough boxes, you get a certain category. In reality, it seems managers stack rank, and then apply the required curve to the stack rank. If everybody on your team does their job as expected (or better), too bad, X% need to be flagged as poor performers as declared by the performance curve.

What is better, an objective measurement of the wrong thing, or a subjective measurement of the right thing?

Which is more fair? Note that objective measurement of the wrong thing will reward people for stuff other than quality, and probably stuff beyond their control.

It's not that metrics in general are bad, it's that bad metrics are bad.

What's the best metric for metric quality?

It's metrics all the way down...

You are conflating justice with “objectivity”. They are not the same thing.

How so?

Can you do that even with metrics? I really doubt that.