Comment by lokar

IMO, the root of all of this is the almost total inability for most managers, and most eng orgs to measure individual engineer output in any useful way. And in particular in a way that lets you reliably compare engineers to each other.

Despite decades of the industry telling itself that we "pay for performance" or whatever, that has never been the case because we can't really measure performance very well. Where I have seen it done ok (not great, just ok), it was massively labor intensive and did not last, and was only done fully when considering promotion.

So, as you observe, now we have some new technique that managers are sure will increase performance by 50+%, if only people would use it. They can't just raise their expectations of performance by 50%, because they can't measure performance to within 50%! So, they measure the thing they can: token consumption.