It's really not obvious to calculate the output of any employee even with years of data, way harder for a software engineer or any other job with that many facets. If you've found a proven and reliable way evaluate someone in the first 2 weeks you just solved one of the biggest HR problems ever.
What if, and hear me out, we asked the people a new employee has been onboarding with? I know, trusting people to make a fair judgment lacks the ass-covering desired by most legal departments but actually listening to the people who have to work with a new hire is an idea so crazy it might just work.
The Brits don't produce anything anymore except money laundering in the City of London (where i work btw) and some cattle, so you should expect that kind of biased narrative from them. We in Italy are among the best and most profitable in the high-tech mechanical manufacturing industry, but we also have the worst paid engineers and technicians of the western world. The Italian Miracle.
I'll explain you how it works: upper management needs urgent spend cuts in the next 3-6-12 months to get bonus -> upper management lays off N thousands people in order to reach goal and get bonus.
I've not seen the claim you're satirising in years. But I am still seeing the satire years after Windows became the third most common user operating system.
The first is Linux.
The only reason Microsoft can afford to treat Windows with such disdain is that desktop operating systems became an afterthought.
That happened not by choice, but by chance and due to "OOP consultants" running rampant in the 2000s. Source: i have to maintain Java slop in a bank, and used to maintain Java slop in manufacturing.
