Great points.
One can be both competent and incompetent at the same time, depending on who’s judging.
No framework would trump a person’s opinion of one.
I’ve been in situations, with multiple managers(CTO, IT managers, VP of business, PMs, POs, Digital Managers, Architects, Dev Leads, etc…) above me with an interest in testing, quality assurance, quality management, and automation in testing, where things weren’t aligned for everyone, and quality measures and criteria were subjective.
I’ve been praised by some and by others warned about being fired or talked behind my back about how bad I am(and how good another tester is because he does what they want).
That other tester was similarly praised by the managers who didn’t like me, and disliked by those that liked me.
An example of a framework for the evaluation of a tester is a consultancy contract.
I’ve seen many testers being fired, not for a clause in the contract, but because the manager didn’t like them. Also, consultancy companies get banned from doing any other jobs for a company, due to the low level of testers(subjective to dev/s, PM, or higher management) they might bring forward to a company.
But also contracts were extended when testers brought something useful to some person who cared.
Another example of a framework I can think of is a generic model applied to all the employees for end-of-year evaluations. The nature of this evaluation in my experience is subjective for the evaluator who again holds the higher power.
The result of the evaluation can go in any direction depending on the nature of the relationship between the tester and manager, how much they understand each other, and how much the manager is involved in what the tester is doing during the year.
I can think of a third example of evaluation for competency, the peers’ feedback. Sometimes the evaluation of the tester, by the manager who matters, is based on other testers’ or test leads’ or devs’ feedback during casual chats they had with him. It happened to me twice that the IT manager called me to say they’d give me a raise as they received very good feedback whenever they asked about me.