Too easy to game: People are just going to gauge for themselves what management considers "not a bullshit problem" and report that, making sure that the blame rests on unpopular people or third parties.

Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the company absolutely tanks as a result.

Exactly, an effective CEO / Executive is going to be developing systems of accountability that align with company goals. It can't be based entirely on a set of gameable metrics. However this starts at the top. An incompetent board / CEO is going to create misaligned incentives which will cascade through the organization.

It seems to me that if you want to be a CEO that wants to stay connected at the ground level, then you have to actually do that: you have to know each engineer, and understand the work they’re doing on any given day. Naturally, this tightly constrains the possible size of the company. If you want to grow beyond that size you must accept that you will become disconnected and out of touch and all of the bs being discussed here will inevitably creep in.

Long ago I worked in places where the CEO did exactly that. "Management by walking around" (it even had the abbreviation MBWA) has fallen out of favor, though. People just don't walk any more.

This was about 1000 people.

1K is way higher than I would’ve guessed, that’s good to know! Very impressive.

They already do that in some indusries, so I'm down to experiment with literally any other option.

Teams can actually function well and have no problems for periods of time. I those cases you would almost certainly break that by firing the manager.

I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear and dishonesty.

Who is that "you" who hired poorly? I am a programmer, I did not hire anyone.

My comment from much above, to which many people replied, was from the point of view of a working programmer.

I was just assuming you were talking about managers not independent contributors. The "you" would be the person with the authority to fire though, as a working programmer would have absolutely no power to fire anyone saying there are no problems.

If the culture of the company is checked-out people doing some nonsense to get a paycheck, you’re not going to fix that by tough love unless you will actually fire 80% of the company. What really happens is you fire some useless people but who made someone’s life at work easier or more fun and now everyone who is somewhat competent will start looking for a better job.