Yes, you've described why large corporations are hated. It's quite obvious that a handful of numbers are incapable of measuring a person's true impact, yet by god, they insist on trying.
All businesses want good employees, but what they want most are employees that can be replaced if necessary. They hire people to accomplish tasks and add value. I have felt underappreciated in corporate roles before, but then I realized that I was attaching too much of my identity to my job and in something where I had no real equity. Since then, I am much better at separating work from personal life, and I am happier putting my personal interests above the company's.
Yeah, I was a lot less upset about some of the crappy experiences I'd had working for evil giant companies after I read "The E-Myth Revisited".
My elite 10 person team was doing a great job on Device A, while Device B had a team of 200 semi-skilled foreign contractors just barely keeping things on track. Then, somehow, the company decided to reorg my super-skilled team and promoted the leader of the contractor team.
From 3-4 levels up in the company, the Device A team and the Device B team were IDENTICAL. They were both delivering things on time and under budget, even though team A was costing the company 1/5th as much, they were both fine. These products were generating hundreds of millions of dollars or maybe even billions in revenue per year, so the difference $5 million/year and $25 million was irrelevant.
If I'd realized this sooner, I wouldn't have put so much effort into doing a great job at the expense of my own interests, and it would've been just fine
In the end, you have to pay someone a wage which is....a single number. Say what you want about boiling down the complexities of job performance into such a limited scale, but this is what is required.
