Throwaway cause I'm a lurker and don't really care.
Just sharing a contrarian experience...
As a manager of 7, formerly 10, those 'non-superstars' can easily go find a job elsewhere as well. Remember, these are engineers. "Superstars" or not, they're not stupid. The demand is there.
When management balked at requests to bump pay (not even that much, and only to bring it in line for the region) for people they didn't think were 'rockstars', they walked off to better offers (I don't have authority here to bump pay without approvals).
It's created a bit of a headache. Not only do we have to find replacements, which is time consuming, folks are concerned they may not be considered a superstar (it hasn't been stated so succinctly, but the conversations have that vibe).
And in the long run, it was decided to raise pay across the board to reflect the increase in the area.
Be fair to your employees as a whole. Assess their overall contribution to the company. Not just number of commits, LOC, or that the wrote some really cool but useless feature in no time at all (really hate when my boss beams over having folks like that here, fortunately they're not on my team).
Fun related story: a few years ago, Google was hiring entire teams from Microsoft away to work on Google-only projects. After noticing the ongoing pattern, Microsoft just doubled the salaries of entire teams over night. 90k -> 180k. 110k -> 220k. That stopped the Google drain for a while.
Just sharing a contrarian experience...
As a manager of 7, formerly 10, those 'non-superstars' can easily go find a job elsewhere as well. Remember, these are engineers. "Superstars" or not, they're not stupid. The demand is there.
When management balked at requests to bump pay (not even that much, and only to bring it in line for the region) for people they didn't think were 'rockstars', they walked off to better offers (I don't have authority here to bump pay without approvals).
It's created a bit of a headache. Not only do we have to find replacements, which is time consuming, folks are concerned they may not be considered a superstar (it hasn't been stated so succinctly, but the conversations have that vibe).
And in the long run, it was decided to raise pay across the board to reflect the increase in the area.
Be fair to your employees as a whole. Assess their overall contribution to the company. Not just number of commits, LOC, or that the wrote some really cool but useless feature in no time at all (really hate when my boss beams over having folks like that here, fortunately they're not on my team).