Developers is one thing, but how about sysadmin work? I think I've seen it there, too. I looked at the tickets worked by a group of people from June 1 to December 15 of a year far in the past. The counts looked like this:
That's a total of 13970 tickets closed by 17 techs. If you split it evenly, that's 821 each, or about 5.8%. The lowest tech only handled 0.85% of the load. The highest tech handled 15%! If you use the extremes, that's a 17x difference. It also means the top tech did almost 2.5x the "fair share" load of 5.8%.
Now, to be clear, tickets are not fungible. One ticket may be simple and another might take days to finish. Still, when there's that much of a difference, odds are the person at the top is doing all of them regardless of the complexity. That's the only way to find enough things to do.
My wife worked with a guy who closed a ticket about closing tickets. If you're measured purely on the basis of number of tickets closed, you can game the system. Replaced users mouse, ticket closed. Or, upgraded network software on 300 machines, ticket closed. If someone is doing twice as many tickets as the next guy, I'd assume he is doing a lot of BS work, not that he's twice as fast.
Well, yeah, that's why I said tickets aren't fungible.
Still, when you have someone hopping on them as quickly as they're opened while someone else just grabs one every hour or two, something is wrong. What if I told you the "one every hour or two" person was doing the dumbest, simplest ones, while the top tech was doing the hardest ones (in addition to everything else)? It happened.
119 348 353 409 515 559 572 634 722 779 830 1004 1029 1169 1345 1487 2096
That's a total of 13970 tickets closed by 17 techs. If you split it evenly, that's 821 each, or about 5.8%. The lowest tech only handled 0.85% of the load. The highest tech handled 15%! If you use the extremes, that's a 17x difference. It also means the top tech did almost 2.5x the "fair share" load of 5.8%.
Now, to be clear, tickets are not fungible. One ticket may be simple and another might take days to finish. Still, when there's that much of a difference, odds are the person at the top is doing all of them regardless of the complexity. That's the only way to find enough things to do.