The problem with this idea is that it's very easy to incentivize the wrong metric.
What are you going to do for a programmer?
Feature? Prepare for features that barely meet the spec and nothing else.
Lines of code? Prepare for massive code bloat.
And all of these will also mean no-one will bother with internal tools or any quality of life clean ups. Refactoring will be avoided. Helping other people will mean earning less money.
There's also research out there that shows this is a bad idea. This type of incentivization has negative effects on productivity in our type of work. People won't say no to more money, but it doesn't make them work better.
Your final paragraph highlights bad management, not communism. If you've a few stars and a lot of mediocre then your management has failed. Be it their hiring, their day-to-day management, their personal development of their staff, their lack of challenging work, poor planning, whatever it is it's not expecting a few to carry the burden, it's letting a few carry the burden because of bad management.
There is good enough metric for your 'work', its wealth generated at the end of it. Many even refer to it as value created. Again I know the next question you will ask is what if the person worked hard and still fail. Well that is not going to be often.
Team work is every body working to achieve something. One set of people making up for other peoples inefficiency isn't team work.
I am not telling people must be paid more money to motivate them, I am saying.. We must ask people to work more to earn more money. Which is perfectly acceptable. I don't know why I should earn equal to some guy sitting next when I do far more than what he does.
Again counter argument to that which people put is, that putting in extra effort is personal choice so it shouldn't be compared. Well in that case, the other argument is also valid. If some one chooses to be inefficient its his/her problem.
> There is good enough metric for your 'work', its wealth generated at the end of it.
In a company larger than a startup, this is usually outside the employees control. A project with a small (or no) market, isn't going to make a lot of money, even if it was a lot of work to create. The people assigned to work on such a project may not be there by choice. Also, what about "internal" projects that don't actually generate revenue, but make everyone more efficient?
The point isn't that a productivity can't be measured, but there seems to be a lack of willingness to measure it.
Its simple, if you actually start paying people by their work. You are at the same time putting a lot of other not-so-good-but-lucky people in serious trouble. People higher up in the hierarchy are especially very afraid of this. People who got quickly promoted during the gold rush, people who benefiting from job hopping by claiming 30% hikes on each hop every 9 months will be in serious trouble.
In a place where all your work is transparent and your rewards are driven by it. A few productive people will run the asylum.
The majority isn't going to be happy with this. People love getting rich by chance and not by choice and work.
This still doesn't deal with the problem of "what you work on isn't your choice" If I get assigned to, maybe, improve the front page by implementing a design from the graphic designer who gets paid more if the front page drives more signups?
The graphic designer, for his/her awesome design? Me, for the time I spent implementing it? Both of us?
What if it fails horribly? Do I take a hit (in the sense of not creating wealth/not getting paid more) because the graphic designer did a horrible job? Orders came down that said "Implement this" and I had no choice but to say "ok" (maybe I could argue the point, but at the end of the day it's not my decision)
Don't misunderstand, I'm not against measuring output - but you make it sound easy and it's not. In a small (< 20 people) company, you may be able to measure an individual's contribution to the bottom line, but in a company where an individual project may involve 30+ contributors, how do you evaluate who was most important to the projects success?
I also fear that trying to measure output, like you suggest, would create perverse incentives. When everyone's pay depends on their contribution to the bottom line, it's in everyones interest to attribute as many accomplishments to themselves as possible (while downplaying any mistakes). In this kind of environment those who float to the top are not necessarily the best individuals, but the ones most skilled at self-promotion. This is no better than the current situation, really.
Edit: In principle, if you could (in a non-political way) measure someone's contribution to the bottom line, this would be an ideal yardstick for setting compensation. But I think that the complexity of large projects and human nature makes this kind of measurement impossible.
What are you going to do for a programmer?
Feature? Prepare for features that barely meet the spec and nothing else.
Lines of code? Prepare for massive code bloat.
And all of these will also mean no-one will bother with internal tools or any quality of life clean ups. Refactoring will be avoided. Helping other people will mean earning less money.
There's also research out there that shows this is a bad idea. This type of incentivization has negative effects on productivity in our type of work. People won't say no to more money, but it doesn't make them work better.
Your final paragraph highlights bad management, not communism. If you've a few stars and a lot of mediocre then your management has failed. Be it their hiring, their day-to-day management, their personal development of their staff, their lack of challenging work, poor planning, whatever it is it's not expecting a few to carry the burden, it's letting a few carry the burden because of bad management.