Programming work is also maintenance. You need people around to put out fires or keep things up to date. If you’re only paying based on performance, the high pe

Programming work is also maintenance. You need people around to put out fires or keep things up to date. If you’re only paying based on performance, the high performers will do a big project and immediately leave to somewhere else. The lower performers (at least impact-wise) won’t be there to fix a mess or make incremental upgrades. This approach already happens. This is actually why a lot of software at larger companies aren’t user friendly. There are obvious small bugs or quality of life improvements that could be made for the customer, but it’s hard to tie to measured revenue impact so the SWE team does nothing to fix it.