[jrowen]

At the end of the day, it's all emotional and biased human beings subjectively evaluating/judging other human beings. This guy that worked with Tim believed that he added great value to the team. A manager came to a different conclusion. It's impossible for them to determine who is "correct," let alone us. Of course we can come up with all sorts of potential scenarios but it seems pointless and unfounded without first-hand knowledge of the situation. The skill of being a manager is deeply understanding the specific and individual nature of their team rather than trying to apply a more generalized "playbook."

Edit: By that I mean that I am highly skeptical of metrics used to evaluate people. It's a lazy way to make the job easy and avoid doing the hard work of getting in the trenches, gaining unquantifiable insight into what's going on, and effectively communicating that up the chain.

[relix]

Of course. My point is that this exact same situation, at a different company, may have surfaced a Tim that actually should be PIPed because he wasn't doing what he was asked to do, or his contributions weren't as valuable from an objective point of view (but of course all his peers love him taking some load off and them being able to get all the credit), or he was forcing a team dynamic that should be "fixed" because Tim is actually a Brent (from Phoenix Project) that had to have his hand in everything and the team couldn't survive without him, yet it may be difficult to discern these situations from the situation described in the article where Tim (sounds like) he was definitely bringing more value to the team than a replacement would.

Yeah it's a few hypotheticals onwards, and there's probably better ways to surface those problems, but companies are messy and no one is without flaw or 100% competent, no engineer and no manager.

(Note that I'm not saying evaluating a person based on delivering story points is optimal, or even useful)