I don’t understand this response, all of us judge each other all of the time on secret, unspoken metrics, that’s human nature. Our entire culture and society is partly built on what is not said.

Your bank is scoring you by machine, so is your insurance company, and loan companies, are their algorithms 100% open and publicly available? No. Because they are secret metrics. Your bank knows more about you than you know, and so do the loan companies, I know, I used to work there. The datasets the loan companies have are insane, I could see if you are in financial distress or not, the value of your house, whether you were a “complainer” or not, your favourite music, whether you’re a foodie or not, and heaps, heaps more, I think 250 attributes on each person in the USA at one company.

What difference does it make if some metrics are collected by machine and not fuzzy, vague, human intuition? I think it’s an improvement.

Yes the metrics inform the seniors decisions partially like I said above, and yes they are taken with a grain of salt, like I said above, they are inputs for deeper investigation, that’s it.

Here’s an example that happened just the other day: I noticed heaps of CICD failures for one dev and I reached out to him. He told me he couldn’t easily run the test suite, so I spent an hour peer coding with him and showed him how to use VSCodes debugger.

1 day later he called me up and told me that “using the debugger was a life changer” and he was thrilled to be working so quickly, the faster feedback cycle from code->debug had restored his enthusiasm for work.