Most people cannot even tell you how to measure a programmer's performance. But we're comfortable with firing the "lowest performing" developers? Lowest performing by what metric?
Honestly these "get rid of poor performance" policies are just abused to remove people who others have a personal dislike for, or similarly those who don't make enough friends to game the system.
Plus whose to say that even if we could measure performance, that it wouldn't be down to externalities outside of the individual's control (e.g. poor manager, poor team culture, bad project requirements, poorly written/documented legacy system they need to integrate with, etc).
To put this idea another way: good managers are humans, and exceptional humans aren't scalable. To solve that problem, companies try to deploy algorithms (via spreadsheets or software) that do scale, but end up being terrible managers.
Most people cannot even tell you how to measure a programmer's performance. But we're comfortable with firing the "lowest performing" developers? Lowest performing by what metric?
Honestly these "get rid of poor performance" policies are just abused to remove people who others have a personal dislike for, or similarly those who don't make enough friends to game the system.
Plus whose to say that even if we could measure performance, that it wouldn't be down to externalities outside of the individual's control (e.g. poor manager, poor team culture, bad project requirements, poorly written/documented legacy system they need to integrate with, etc).