half of all teams are below averageIf you only look at your organization then yes 1/2 of the teams in your org are below average for your org, not necessarily below average for all software developers. I'm not talking about trying to hire only the best of the best like Google. I'm talking about avoiding the worst of the worst.
On occasion a come to jesus talk might be appropriate with some types of employees, but once one starts threatening people with the loss of employment, bad things often follow - particularly in the US where such threats often mean loss of access to healthcare for the employee's family.
So are you arguing to just fire them outright? I thought that's what you were against? And since when is a frank review of performance a threat? This must be where 'everyone gets a trophy' day has led us. Unless people are told their true performance and how it stacks up to what's expected they will not be able to improve. It may be that they are simply unaware how bad they are performing, or they simply need to be motivated.
BTW, when the job is pushing the boulder forward, smart people recognize the sisyphean nature of the task and respond accordingly.
Huh? Are you saying all work is useless? That's certainly not what I meant by the term. Pushing the boulder forward is what I consider advancing the business in a given direction, one that I certainly hope doesn't have to be backtracked.
In business there are people on the boulder deciding where it should go then there are people on the ground making it happen (I'm including all the support people here). Finally there are people standing on the boulder doing neither, and instead provide dead weight to be carried.
In small companies the people who decide the direction and make it happen are often the same. This is what makes small companies so nimble. Those deciding where to go also know directly of the challenges of getting there. Small companies also rarely have much dead weight just standing around.
In big companies there is often a huge divide between those who decide direction and those who make it happen. Big companies also tend to have lots of people just standing around on the boulder. Now, standing around isn't so bad until these people start getting in the way of the job of advancing the business. When they start actively trying to make things harder for those pushing because they feel some odd sense of job security by doing it that way.