I'm just posing the question. We can assume that the HR people at Goldman Sachs are not idiots. There was no obviously better system or they and many other companies would have used it.
So lets say you identify the best team (itself a flawed concept - is sales more important than development, since they bring in the cash?) , then do you propose to treat everyone in the team the same? What about the new hire into the team who is struggling and should never have been a developer in the first place? What about the lazy stoner? What about the girl genius who reworked the problem areas over a weekend? Should they all get the same raise because they're on the same team?
you're spending an awful lot of time worrying about hypothetical people.
your argument would be more convincing if you started to explain your reasoning rather than just throwing out a list of cliches of "undesirables" in your opinion.
ok, lets keep playing the hypothetical persons game then.
the lazy stoner? sure he smokes up at home and comes in to the office late basically every day. he's also an outside the box thinker who pioneers the use of new technology on his team, and is an expert debugger who can view problems from angles his colleagues haven't considered yet and maybe never would have.
the new hire who's struggling? its not her technical ability thats lacking, she's just going through some shit in her personal life. her father is sick with cancer and she's splitting her time between her tiny New York apartment where she lives with 3 roommates and her parent's house in the suburbs where she helps her overwhelmed mother catch up on laundry and sweeping the floors at home.
the girl genius who reworked the problem over the weekend? well she's an arrogant workaholic and constantly talks down to her coworkers and drains the morale of the team. she spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make herself look better to the boss and eagerly takes full credit for projects she collaborated on with 5 other people, but she doesn't mention that at her quarterly review meetings.
If your point is that its hard to measure people's true performance, then yeah, sure.
If your point is that everyone should be paid the same because its too hard to ascertain actual performance, then you better find a gig on Cuba or some other functioning communist society.
So lets say you identify the best team (itself a flawed concept - is sales more important than development, since they bring in the cash?) , then do you propose to treat everyone in the team the same? What about the new hire into the team who is struggling and should never have been a developer in the first place? What about the lazy stoner? What about the girl genius who reworked the problem areas over a weekend? Should they all get the same raise because they're on the same team?