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Comment by sudeepj | Hacker News Reader

The thing with algorithms in such use-cases is that once people know the algorithm (even partially), they will start gaming it. E.g. Google's ranking algorithm and there are companies who do SEO.

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Which is what people do with PRP systems now I knew one guy where I worked who was going for promotion - as my Team leader remarked of course he hasn't done any real work in the last 6 months.

I also know someone who spent £1,000,000 and 15 /16 Man years on a project to redevelop an existing system into oracle - added no share holder value but they ticked a box on the promotion track.

I think that's already a problem. It doesn't matter who enforces them. You can get a lot of applicants that can answer your computer science questions but still fail at writing a simple fizzbuzz.

Which, if the algorithm makes sense, will lead to better employees - do you think this is bad?

The point is that the algorithm isn't what people are currently trying to get past, they are trying to get past human hiring. When they switch to a strategy gaming the algorithms instead of the humans then the algorithms can become worse than nothing depending on how quickly the information race goes.

It is the same story as the key performance indicators in employee assessment. People stop working to the wealth of the enterprise and instead focus on the growth of their indicators.

If this is possible, we've proved that the performance indicators do not indicate what you defined as "performance" but something different and thus should be dropped.

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