Software engineer is put on a team that has more legacy code. If management judges by # of incidents, they are under performing.
Heck I can tell you from experience that if you want to get promoted fast, new product teams are the way to go. You get to file lots of patents, architect huge new systems, and look like a rock star.
Another example: Partner teams upstream keep pushing breaking API changes, downstream teams look bad because their services are the ones having the outage. You do your due diligence, your code is defect free, well tested. Doesn't matter, you are spending half your day putting out fires caused by someone else. Meanwhile another co-worker starts on a team where their upstream services are written to be robust against bad incoming data and have APIs that maintain back compat. Your co-worker puts out buggy poorly tested code, but the upstream services are robust enough that everything keeps chugging along.
Management doesn't see any of this. They just see your team has poor performance, and this other team has great performance. Heck maybe that other team has a higher "velocity" because they can turn out features faster.
Heck I can tell you from experience that if you want to get promoted fast, new product teams are the way to go. You get to file lots of patents, architect huge new systems, and look like a rock star.
Another example: Partner teams upstream keep pushing breaking API changes, downstream teams look bad because their services are the ones having the outage. You do your due diligence, your code is defect free, well tested. Doesn't matter, you are spending half your day putting out fires caused by someone else. Meanwhile another co-worker starts on a team where their upstream services are written to be robust against bad incoming data and have APIs that maintain back compat. Your co-worker puts out buggy poorly tested code, but the upstream services are robust enough that everything keeps chugging along.
Management doesn't see any of this. They just see your team has poor performance, and this other team has great performance. Heck maybe that other team has a higher "velocity" because they can turn out features faster.