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.

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 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.

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.

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

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