This is what all the cool-aid drinkers are missing in this thread. You can feel like you worked your ass off, or you can feel like you've been coasting, and still get the same performance review. I've seen genuinely valuable engineers get middling performance reviews because they didn't commit as many lines of code to Github that quarter as the other guy on their team.

That's an extreme example, but even in a "good" system, management is notoriously blind to the actual value of an engineer. In a perfect system, performance could be measured empirically and compensation would be based on that. But no one on earth has figured that out yet, and something tells me they never will.

It's not just about performance reviews.

Imagine a world in which it's very difficult to assess performance, because that's often the reality.

How does this system flourish if everyone is doing the minimum / least?

It doesn't. It fails.

'Do A Good Job'.

That the performance reviews say are a secondary factor.

If you all stop doing good work, it will fall apart quickly and you will all be poor.

> If you all stop doing good work, it will fall apart quickly and you will all be poor.

I'm replying late, but wow, this is a gem of an argument.

Really? The economic incentives that create this lucrative field in the first place are all gonna collapse if devs realize they don't need to bust ass at their job anymore? It's amazing that you think the individual work ethic of engineers is the only thing holding the tech economy together.

How would software get written if the people that write software don’t write software? Curious.