The recipe list lost all credibility with

> Find the most productive employee you have

which the author admitted you can't accurately do.

This is a recipe for disaster, not because reducing people to cold, heartless quantitative metrics is necessarily bad, but because this is totally subjective, and will ultimately devolve into simply rating the people you happen to like as "more productive" or giving them free passes with the "special skills/circumstances" column (for example, imagine if that column came to simply represent diversity criteria).

Someone considered for termination due to being low in the CPUP ordering is probably more likely just someone that people don't like, or someone who does a great job but within a business unit that some other political rival wants to defeat, disband, or re-org in order to consolidate internal political control.

Also, it's very reasonable for people to discount profit sharing pay. Such pay is generally less specifically defined in employment agreements, easier for an employer to omit for arbitrary reasons, affected not just by one's own performance but also performance of others.

These are wage risks that a given employee largely cannot diversify away. Whereas with salary, there are many legal protections preventing an employer from omitting salary without documented cause.

The more of your pay that is arbitrarily discretionary and at the whim of your employer's choice, the more variance there is in your overall wage outcomes, and if you're risk averse (as many people are when it comes to wages) you'll very rationally discount the value of that kind of wage stream compared to a wage stream with far lower risk.

I also wonder if this employer does basic things, like giving all knowledge workers private offices. If the employer doesn't do that, but then does judge the workers on their productivity, it's exceedingly hypocritical, and a red flag of a bad employer.

I liked the way this was stated in the classic software productivity book Peopleware (paraphrasing ...)

> If the employer did not care enough about protecting everyone's productivity [e.g. by using obviously cost effective technology like private offices in the first place], then I'm not going to kill myself to make up that productivity lag.

An employer who actually cares about productivity will provide workers with all the things they need to actually be productive: state of the art tools, adequate access to privacy and quiet space, adequate vacation and rest time, adequate work/life balance, positive and collegial atmosphere, transparency about performance expectations and appraisals, etc.

They will make the office (and the non-physical workflow structures of the organization) into a place that facilitates getting work done instead of being something that you get work done in spite of.

Obviously, I can't say how it plays out for this particular employer, but most often all you ever see is that the employer points fingers at employees and makes arbitrary and erratic and politically motivated decisions about who to promote, fire, or give a raise. Rarely will they ever point the finger at themselves and say, "How is it that I am failing as a manager to provide the right sort of workplace that would help this worker reach a higher CPUP [or whatever]."

Given all of this, it's a very reasonable heuristic to simply call bullshit on employers who say this crap. Yes, maybe this is the one-in-a-million employer who actually takes a humanity-affirming perspective to it. But you're probably better off just assuming this employer is not such a rare case, and just avoiding them because of all the red flags this emits.