And yet somehow most people in charge of resourcing and budgeting for projects, teams and companies have some idea of who to hire, how much to pay them, etc. How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure?
It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if those people could estimate their own contribution, or, god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.
> How do you think they do that with something that is nearly impossible to measure?
The floor is mostly arbitrary (see the wage collusion scandal between Apple and Google for an example), and then beyond that it's a question of who is the most productive, effective at getting things done, etc.
So while they do have "something to measure," these metrics can be uncorrelated with profitability - or even negatively correlated with it. It's possible for a productive team to spend their time on an unprofitable project, while another team barely works but ships a profitable product.
Profitability is not the only short-term metric. In poker I know when a bet is worth it, even if it ends up not winning the pot (unprofitable). Is your argument that business people are just randomly guessing and have no idea how much profit they could expect to make by spending specific amount of payroll?
It certainly wouldn't benefit anyone who hires people if those people could estimate their own contribution, or, god forbid, compare it to their compensation. I think there's a term for the difference which now eludes me.