That's exactly the problem. You're assuming that there is a single metric of "best" that you can rank people on. Even in programming, there are a number of separate skills: algorithm design, systems architecture, debugging, etc. Is a programmer who can sit down with an unfamiliar codebase and be productive with it in a week's time "better" than a programmer who is great at designing scalable systems from scratch? You need a mix of technical skills, not just a team overloaded with whatever people and skills a particular manager finds interesting.
I think the biggest problem with your statement is that you're trying to identify the best people, rather than the best teams.
I'm just posing the question. We can assume that the HR people at Goldman Sachs are not idiots. There was no obviously better system or they and many other companies would have used it.
So lets say you identify the best team (itself a flawed concept - is sales more important than development, since they bring in the cash?) , then do you propose to treat everyone in the team the same? What about the new hire into the team who is struggling and should never have been a developer in the first place? What about the lazy stoner? What about the girl genius who reworked the problem areas over a weekend? Should they all get the same raise because they're on the same team?
you're spending an awful lot of time worrying about hypothetical people.
your argument would be more convincing if you started to explain your reasoning rather than just throwing out a list of cliches of "undesirables" in your opinion.
ok, lets keep playing the hypothetical persons game then.
the lazy stoner? sure he smokes up at home and comes in to the office late basically every day. he's also an outside the box thinker who pioneers the use of new technology on his team, and is an expert debugger who can view problems from angles his colleagues haven't considered yet and maybe never would have.
the new hire who's struggling? its not her technical ability thats lacking, she's just going through some shit in her personal life. her father is sick with cancer and she's splitting her time between her tiny New York apartment where she lives with 3 roommates and her parent's house in the suburbs where she helps her overwhelmed mother catch up on laundry and sweeping the floors at home.
the girl genius who reworked the problem over the weekend? well she's an arrogant workaholic and constantly talks down to her coworkers and drains the morale of the team. she spends a lot of time thinking about ways to make herself look better to the boss and eagerly takes full credit for projects she collaborated on with 5 other people, but she doesn't mention that at her quarterly review meetings.
If your point is that its hard to measure people's true performance, then yeah, sure.
If your point is that everyone should be paid the same because its too hard to ascertain actual performance, then you better find a gig on Cuba or some other functioning communist society.
You can apply selection when you form a new team for a new project. Then you select the best people for that project. Ranking scores are unidimensional, absolute evaluations of people. They can be abused by adding penalties based on frivolous criteria.
In China, Ali Baba and others have created a ranking for regular population, called the "social credit". If you make friends with someone who has a low rank score, your own score will be penalized (they want to control who people make friends with and socially isolate people by descoring them). Also, if you watch too many American movies instead of Chinese. These scoring systems (and even Google's Page Rank) pervert the normal behavior of people.
On the latter point, I think this will become more prevalent in the future, and has really interesting applications in displacing trust as a dependency in interpersonal interactions.
Once we have more accurate profiles on individuals, and the profiles are shared more widely, you could make much more informed decisions about who you want to share public spaces, interact, work, live, or even enter into relationships with.
By not rewarding based on "the best" (which implies comparison) and instead based on performance. Set realistic and definable targets for such rewards and follow through. Additionally, communicate these targets clearly. Allow for additional rewards for team performance.
I believe this maximizes the motivation you get from rewards both on an individual and team level creating the "best" you can get.
Although, realize, studies have shown rewards generally don't impact performance greatly.
A good team has people with a mix of skill sets. The "best" people depend on your choice of skill, but multiple skills are required to excel and it's almost certain no one person will be best at all.
Sometimes it's the gestalt of the team that works well; sometimes there's simply no easy way to isolate contribution.
