No, I’m not. I’m arguing that it’s unwise to trust someone to do an evaluation who has a personal stake in the result of that evaluation.
Looking at how well a team works together to advance company goals is an important factor in any evaluation system, but using that as the only factor in a manager’s evaluation is as shortsighted as evaluating a software engineer solely on how many LOC they produced.
In practice, overall team performance should be a factor in IC evaluations as it’s reflective of various hard-to-quantify properties of the team members. It should also be a somewhat larger factor in a manager’s evaluation, with the weight between IC and team performance shifting from mostly-IC at the bottom of the hierarchy to mostly-team at the C-suite level.
My concern with this is: How do you correct for luck/easy tasks?
It’s hard to compare the performance of departments unless you have been inside and seen the challenges they’ve been facing.
> A manager’s job, fundamentally, is to ensure that their reports are delivering appropriate value to the company, so the most direct measure of a manager’s performance is the performance of the ICs that report to them (possibly indirectly).
Now, you're arguing that `sum(evaluate(impact) for each IC)` is absurdly bad. Which it is, because you're compounding errors in individual evaluations. These are hard to do, because you're trying to distribute team's achievements between contributions from particular people. I say that `evaluate(sum(impact for each IC))` is easy and robust. In fact simpler than an evaluation for a single IC, because you don't have to distribute anything and a lot of things that are external distractions for ICs fall into responsibility of managers.