# How you compare across companies

_Published July 25, 2026_

**By [Eugenio Sanchez](https://mesmer.co/resources/author/eugenio)**

**Section:** Feature release

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Comparing one team member to another, or one month to the next only
tells you so much. It can't tell you whether where your performance is
normal, strong, or weak when compared to teams like yours. Benchmarks
add that missing axis.

The [Metrics page](/resources/metrics-page) now plots every engineer as
a dot on a single scale, shipped
[effort](/resources/effort-recalibration) per working day, against the
**Mesmer Benchmark**: an anonymized distribution pooled from the
hundreds of teams using Mesmer.

_[Visual: dot plot of shipped effort per engineer per working day, graded against Mesmer Benchmark percentile lines (P10–P99)]_

### What's new

- **Normalized the same way for everyone.** Effort is divided by the
  working days in the month, per engineer, so month length and company
  size drop out. A ten-person shop and a thousand-person org contribute
  on equal footing — every engineer is one equally weighted point.
- Filter to a team or a person and those dots light up as “in selected
  scope” while the rest of the org fades back. The benchmark itself
  doesn't budge, you're always read against the full population, never
  a subset of it.
- Benchmarks cover Mesmer's produced effort score and the effort that
  actually shipped. More benchmarks will be added over time.
- **Only real contributors count.** An engineer joins the population
  after clearing a small activity bar, meaningful effort across at
  least a handful of active days. Sporadic commits by non-engineers
  don't drag the benchmark.

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Canonical: https://mesmer.co/resources/metrics-benchmarks