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Brutal. My experience has been that people who do good work and take performance reviews seriously advance just fine. I can count on 2 fingers the number of times in my 23 year sales career that someone was promoted because of reasons unrelated to performance, and both times it was the same loser who was drinking buddies with the VP of Sales.

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Sales is completely different because individual contributions are far easier to measure than e.g. engineering or product management.

Yet you can’t see that sales is inherently different?? You think most jobs have an easily measurable benefit??

Shouldn't they? Shouldn't all work be measurable?

in theory but it's not always so clear, especially in software. if someone had solved this problem they would have a unicorn worth 5B right now

Ideally, yes. But software development is a new field and thus far no one has come up with a reliable way to measure throughout. This is related to why estimating is so hard, we don't know how to determine how hard a task will be before we start it, and once we finish it, we don't know how to determine objectively if it was done as efficiently as possible. Each task is different, and when something goes wrong or takes longer than expected it's hard to tell if the reason is incompetence or actual difficulties.

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