Yes so you have no actual incentive to focus on OKRs. You're doing the work required to keep the company running but the quarter's OKR goals only gets attention if you think it will help your actual job. Is that what you mean?

I don't think anyone expects OKRs to do more than that. Direction to the higher-ups is a valuable thing, and it's not trivial to reliably get it.

Similar experience. We (the devs) quickly realized we'd need a ton of time to create useful metrics for our dev teams and that we'd need a shit-load of historical data we didn't have to give them any context—lots of small- to medium-size projects of many different types, hard to reason about one based on another except with a mountain of data from all of them to treat in aggregate. And it might still just be tea-leaf reading. Probably would be, in fact. And of course we didn't have the time to do that. So we found ways to tie social media marketing stuff (views are the easiest thing to measure!) to higher-level OKRs and did that instead, usually rushing to get it done right before the deadline.

It was not a good use of software developer salaries. An initiative to at least start collecting the data we needed so it might be useful in 2-3 years could have been, but some OKRized version of "start collecting data to use in OKRs 12 quarters from now" wasn't something anyone would get behind and was pretty much impossible to tie to the higher-level OKRs that were being set.

Whole thing was a game to find something easy to measure that could be made to look useful, whether it was or not. It wasn't some huge disaster or anything and I can see how maybe in exactly the right organization it might work, but there's no way it was the right place for that company to spend their money.