We had something like that at one of my jobs. The most senior engineers there were myself and the founder, and everyone else was either fresh out of college or fresh out of high school. The founder had to spend a lot of time on business stuff so most of the things that required a senior engineer were done by me.

Most of what we did was Windows and Mac utility software, usually difficult or tricky stuff that messed heavily with system internals. The way we wrote most of this is that I would write the drivers or file system hooks or other kernel code we needed, and would also write the user mode code to support that, but not write a GUI for it or an installer. My user mode support code would either be an application that would provide a local network interface that a GUI could talk to, or a DLL that could be used by a GUI. For development I'd included a simple terminal emulator that just provided a glass TTY in a window in which I'd have a command line interface so I could develop and test my stuff without needing a GUI.

The founder went on a metrics kick and decided that the way the quarterly profit sharing should work is that everyone would be given a list of all the employees, and would have to assign to each either 2 points, 1 point, or 0 points, indicating whether they thought that employee deserved twice the average amount of profit sharing, just the average amount, or no profit sharing. You had to assign 2 points to 1/4 or the employees, 1 point to 1/2 the employees, and 0 points to 1/4 of the employees.

The points for each employee would be totaled, and the 1/4 with the highest points would get double profit sharing, the 1/4 with the lowest points would get nothing, and the rest would get regular profit sharing. Furthermore, the people with the 8 highest point totals would be on a committee for the next quarter that would largely choose the direction of the company (with the founder being able to override them).

His expectation was that I would be the top vote getter every quarter. After all, every product we currently sold and every product in development was at its core my code.

What actually happened was that everyone in engineering gave me 2 points. Everyone outside engineering gave me 0 or 1. Take the people in testing. They dealt with alpha, beta, and release candidates. They almost never dealt with me. So to them the people doing all the work on the products were the junior engineers who wrote the GUIs and those were who got the 2 point votes. Same with support. If they interacted with an engineer most of the time it was one of the junior engineers because most of the issues were with the GUI. If the underlying problem was with my code support would probably still talk to the junior engineer who write the GUI, who would be the one to determine it was actually a lower level problem and bring it up with me.

Another person who scored low who clearly should have been in the top quarter was our head IT guy. In many ways he was even less visible than me to most employees. There were also some people in operations that were critical to our success and would be hard to replace--surely that means they deserved double shares if anyone did.

This was exactly what I told the founder was going to happen and he had to quickly scrap that system.