> It's seems to me that if companies drew a straight line between here's what you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus, they could get

> It's seems to me that if companies drew a straight line between here's what you need to do to get this much of a raise or this much of a bonus, they could get alot more out of each employee. If we could predict exactly what work needed to be done and how long it would take a theoretical employee to do it, this would be great. But we can’t predict the work with such accuracy, nor can we predict how long it should take to get done. If we planned all of the year’s work in exact detail and underestimated by even 25%, you’d be working 10 hour days every day for a year. It’s not uncommon for projects to take twice as long as estimated, in which case you’d be working 80 hour weeks. Another problem is that once you set specific numeric goals, people will game the hell out of them. I worked at a company that decided to reward people by the number of bug tickets they closed. Suddenly, the number of bug tickets tripled! People were starting to ship code with known bugs because they knew they could get some easy bug fix ticket closes to raise their numbers. It made outcomes worse even though everyone now knew exactly how to get bigger bonuses. Finally, there’s more to reviews than just the things that can be measured through metrics. If someone is crushing their tickets and committing a lot of features but they’re insufferable to work with, they shouldn’t be rewarded for that. Good managers should have their finger on the pulse of these softer aspects of performance, even though it will never be a perfect assessment.