You're forgetting that you could also track secondhand assist as well.
I can't speak for programming but in soccer this is well-known. It's just very hard to Value just like an employer would in terms of having that person on board for morale. Fortunately the better people get it and understand that that person should be value even if they weren't directly involved in making the change but they were definitely a part of it.
This is what plagues me with most corporate companies in the United States. It should be about teamwork not about what this person did or I did, rather what the team did.
Sure you can value people individually, but teams trump individuals all day long in the long run.
A person’s projected morale is very under-appreciated. I don’t know if I’m at the point in my career that I boost morale just by being on the team, but I do know there are people who, if they left my company, would have an impact on my morale even though I never ask them for help or work directly with them.
Just something about knowing a person is an amazing and knowledgeable resource and he’s choosing to work here of all places is a subtle morale boost. When they decide to leave, others might start asking “well if that guy left, am I still making the right decision to stay?”
I’m sure we’ve all experienced someone important leaving our company and having a waterfall of turnover that follows it. That is very disruptive and more should have been done to keep that one employee or at least keep the rest that followed them out the door.
I've seen people like that, and I've been that guy. Ironically, I've been that guy only because I left years after those other men and women that I'd looked up to had moved on, and I'd filled their role for the junior devs who were hired after.
Moving on is a fact of life, more so now that ever. My parents both worked for the same company over 35-40 years before they retired; I don't think I can imagine that'll be even close to the norm for many in the workforce now (especially software / other tech).
A family friend (manages a programming group) kept a basically incompetent but calming, friendly programmer on her team for 2-3 years because of his effect on the emotional state of the rest of the team. She his pay was worth it for that reason. Unfortunately the company's owner eventually realized that he was paying the salary of someone who couldn't program and fired him.
The problem is much more about underperforming teams than well or overperforming teams. In order to dissect the problems of an underperforming team, they need some objective metric (even if it doesn't tell the whole story) to look to, or else you have to deal with people flinging accusations around and poisoning the entire culture.
I can't speak for programming but in soccer this is well-known. It's just very hard to Value just like an employer would in terms of having that person on board for morale. Fortunately the better people get it and understand that that person should be value even if they weren't directly involved in making the change but they were definitely a part of it.
This is what plagues me with most corporate companies in the United States. It should be about teamwork not about what this person did or I did, rather what the team did.
Sure you can value people individually, but teams trump individuals all day long in the long run.