This variance is why it is so hard to assign objective numbers.
Bugs are not created equally.
- assign low effort, high impact, high visibility, low risk projects to the most favorite engineers.
- assign high effort, low impact, low visibility, high risk projects to the least favorite engineers.
Favoritism in toxic orgs is the reward for "loyalty".
Another way is by reorganizing teams, assigning favorites to a team just before the completion of a project. Or assigning undesirable employees to a failed project.
I've heard that claim times and times again.
Often it's from companies believing in "Best Cost IT talent" or whatever the current buzzword is on LinkedIn. Chances are, they never even worked with an SV caliber dev.
We've all seen engineers that are simply running around in circles around others. Just think of John Carmack. If any of these organizations managed to luck out by hiring someone from, let's say Apple or Google, it would most likely change their beliefs that there's no "high performance".
if they are regularly practiced at a company, this means the company puts enough faith in them to overall promote those who deserve it and to decide peoples' and company's fate based on that. Which then makes it quite a decent interview outcome metric.
If on the other hand performance reviews are as bad and worthless as you claim, they should be stopped completely, and everyone running them should be instantly fired as a bunch of ageist favoritist pigs who are scamming the company.
Is high performance making economically valuable contributions? If so, there is huge inherent inequality between the economic value of projects, so the metric is worthless for judging engineering talent.
Is high performance getting good performance reviews? In my experience performance reviews are wrought with favoritism, ageism, and probably other subjectivities that create a very low signal to noise ratio, so that metric is worthless.
Is high performance someone who is good at writing software? There are engineers I know who write very good software but lack the decision making or vision to do so in valuable areas. Thus, another metric is worthless.
The reality is there is no general “high performance”. There are smarter and more motivated people, sure. I think testing for general intelligence, personality type, etc., are valuable. But I also think a lot of high performance is about finding someone who is a good fit for the organization in terms of the individual’s experience and skills and the organization’s needs.