I’ve worked for a half dozen software companies and they were all merit based and fired bad performers. They certainly weren’t perfect and mistakes were made, but as staff I perceived that pay was strongly correlated to performance and as management I worked to have pay correspond to performance and had access to data that demonstrated that.

I’ve worked for orgs where this wasn’t true and I avoid those orgs and prefer environments that are merit based.

I feel bad if people really have never experienced this as it’s really disheartening to work in an org where performance doesn’t matter. That must really suck.

> as management I worked to have pay correspond to performance and had access to data that demonstrated that.

What type of data? Nothing but qualitative analysis of devs work gives any hint on performance IMHO.

I think it’s hard to objectively rate performance consistently across large orgs, but I was referring to being able to view HR records with performance review history and other records.

I've found all the companies I worked at rewarded merit and fired bad performers. Of course the systems were imperfect but on average both happened.

I find it really surprising that you think this happened at all companies you've worked at. In my experience, the difference between good and bad companies was exactly how much they recognised merit and fired bad performers.

Note that "bad performance" is very team specific, if I'm shoved into a spaghetti DS code base and told to not write tests or refactor, then I will definitely end up as a poor performer.

And unfortunately, people being people, lots of managers/leads make decisions based on unexamined emotional states, which tends not to lead to rewarding merit.

Most smaller startups, because it's literally do awesome work or shut down.

Trading/finance, because it's either outsmart the rival trading firms, or lose your entire stack in 1 day.

Could I restate your view as: Competition keeps orgs and people honest.

The economics book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity suggests orgs use something like NPV to assemble as a basket of competing efforts to tackle problems. The strategy of prematurely picking winners, come hell or high water, always struck me as sub-optimal.

I think that is true... but man, if that was 100% of jobs? I don't think a lot of people would love that. You have to have a certain mindset to want to fail over and over again until someday you fail upward.