How are software engineers objectively measured when problems span such large difficulty ranges and there are multiple ways to implement solutions?

Question

Always been curious how “workload” is assigned and estimated for software engineers.

In: 92

Answer 1

I manage software engineers. The truth is that there is no way to fairly judge engineers with “objective” data. Comparing individuals or stack ranking is a toxic fools errand.

There are far too many variables. For example how to you judge a generalist v.s. a specialist? There are 100 other dimensions and each one is fuzzy and requires bias checking at every stage.

Good companies try hard to do fair and wholistic evaluations to ensure pay equity but only in fairly wide bands.

It’s far better to support growth than get hung up on evaluations.