> The problem is that every employee is judged by their ability to get work done
That's mostly not true.
That's mostly not true.
There are so many of these biases. As just one example, studies have shown more talkative people are perceived as being more intelligent, even when this is objectively not true. I will take the time to find references if anyone's curious; I recall an experiment in which a group discussion was held and participants were rated by their peers on intelligence. The experimenters then measured how talkative each person was during the discussion, and their actual intelligence was assessed via a standardized test. Peer's perceptions of intelligence were uncorrelated with actual intelligence, but strongly correlated with talkativeness.
The result is that fast talking employees who focus on impression management, self-promotion, and securing juicier work - work that is of a quality or type more likely to be perceived as being important - at the expense of getting genuinely important but often less glamorous things done, and less things done overall, get rewarded.
This problem is particularly pronounced in American culture where extraversion is already a highly regarded and arguably overvalued trait (e.g. show and tell). It's less of a problem in other cultures, e.g. European cultures, that place higher value on introversion (e.g. quiet work and study).
As an example; here is a long list of Cognitive Biases from wikipedia to ponder over - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
I'm sure you could think of a hypothetical system that is better than what we have. But there are probably good reasons why they haven't been used and I doubt worker fairness is one of them. This is a hard problem to solve.
From behavioural psychology/social biology/game theory(Prisoner's dilemma) etc. we know Humans naturally have a in-group vs. out-group social structure. Within a group, cooperation with trust and fairness rules and competition is generally absent or if it exists is playful. The research by Frans de Waal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_de_Waal) on Primate Social Behaviour (Cooperation/Fairness/Empathy/Reciprocity/etc.) is path-breaking. Here is one of his excellent must-watch Ted talks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk Machiavellian competition comes in only for "status"/"reward" within a group and is not the norm. Competition is more prevalent between groups.
Thus if you look at a person in a organizational hierarchy, there are three immediate groups; a) the people you report to (out group), b) your peers (in group, cooperation predominating, with maybe a little bit of playful competition), c) the people that report to you (in group, cooperation but with trust/fairness predominating). For everybody else we don't know and hence almost always respond with tit-for-tat principle. Finally there is also a need to understand what drives self-motivation.
This is the natural order for Social Homo Sapiens as we understand from current knowledge. But none of this is being considered when measuring Performance/Productivity. For example, all Leaders/Managers almost always place Trust above everything else, Peers emphasize Fairness and the Managed Underlings emphasize Empathy. So while i may accept my manager "grading" me however begrudgingly provided it is "Fair", i will resent the same done by my immediate peers and underlings.
One way to do this properly would be; a) Everybody does a self-appraisal and gives it to their Manager b) The Manager does his job properly by closely monitoring throughout the year and makes his independent appraisal c) Both are submitted to a panel consisting of Managers (one of whom is my immediate Manager with one vote) who don't know the appraisee and finally d) The panel discusses the appraisals with the appraisee in a private interview-like setting. This takes care of the needed Objectivism, Self-Interest, Fairness all together.
PS: Resources for further study can be found in my comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086359
I’d expect this effect to be less pronounced among a group of peers who sees how the others work on a regular basis. Still there, but a lot less pronounced. Behavioral psychologists don’t tend to have access to a group of peers like that, though.
I'll never forget a straight faced conversation about a project dashboard filled with red statuses, with 2 layers of management asking me "what if we change the definition of done?"
I mean sure, what if we pretend delivering code to DEV was done, then it would be done sooner, absolutely. If we never spin up a PROD env, we could mark that green as well, right.
But is the rag status to save managements a* (yay all green) or to represent reality of work remaining to be done to deliver work to clients (its not done).
What's also mostly true is people have a mostly incorrect perception of their abilities.
It's like when 85% of drivers believe they are above average.
If it was mostly untrue, they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job.
This is incredibly naive. The same logic would say that if project estimates were mostly wrong in a given company then they'd be crushed by a competitor who did a better job. And yet project estimation is notoriously terrible across the whole industry.
It sure would be nice if we could all correctly estimate costs, but accurate estimates are clearly not essential for startups to crush it.
But yes, I agree with your point.
You can't get management sign-off on a project that you accurately state will take 4 years, so you will instead just have to maintain and extend the old solution. That's the case where there's no competition.
In a competitive market for engineering estimates, the low estimator will tend to win the bid.
Meanwhile, you'll experience high turnover in your engineers, because you rightly want to only do maintenance, and management doesn't think that you need to pay high salaries to keep the knowledge in house.
So management doesn't want to fund projects with accurate estimates, and engineers don't want to give accurately high estimates for projects they want to undertake.