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spydum

Incase others like me don’t know - OKR is Objectives and Key Results. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR

I honestly have never seen that acronym but apparently popular from Intel management practices?

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I hate it when people use TLAs without defining them.

HTML has an <abbr> tag - please use it.

That takes effort though, and people use TLAs to reduce effort.

Isn't it great that TLA is a TLA and FLA is a TLA, but FLA is not an FLA?

TLA is actually an initialism. :/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym#Nomenclature

real pedants just pronounce it.

rhymes with claw! :-)

Don't forget ELTAs.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ETLA

ETLA :p

Ditto. Head-scratching, elitist jingoisms tend to signal an antipattern of business theater.

Plainspeak > newspeak.

Translation look ahead buffers? That brings back a lot of memories from my computer architecture course.

Is that not tlb?

Hmmm, that actually makes much more sense.

Me too. It seems like every other week people will be spouting some three-letter acronym that you've never heard of. This forces you to ask what it means, and they will always look at you like "what? You don't even know?"

This is a good indicator of a team I don't to work with.

If you work in ICT, it's unavoidable.

I added "what_the_fuck_are_okrs_craig" to the end of the URL in the hopes he gets the message when he looks in his 404 logs...

Are there people who do this?

I look at 404s (and other errors) in prod. Helps find front end bugs and any malicious requests. A 404 should be exceedingly rare in a mature application (depending on the application of course and users' ability to create AND delete data) so it's often a useful metric for figuring out if something's wrong. I don't usually tail the logs and use monitoring instead, but same effect. After a certain scale, I imagine this becomes harder to do and requires different tooling.

Admittedly I'm grumpy today. I sometimes do this "404 trolling" to yell at people.

the knowledge of this has made me happy. :)

Thanks.

unless you keep spamming it to make up a significant amount of logs for the site, i doubt anyone would notice...

It might be useful to include a link so people from here can spam it. Like this: http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2019/03/29/okrs-arent-going-to...

I feel like everyone missed the joke

no jokes on HN, this is serious mum

They're in the same bucket as those who use light gray text on a white background.

My company uses them in a cargo-cult sort of way. I have yet to find anyone at my company who can explain to me what an OKR really is, but apparently I'm supposed to have them entered in to our HR system.

Previous jobs have used them too. They're pretty popular I think.

Number one way for management and so-called leadership to befuddle their way into the arms of Goodhart's law

I think Google or one of the other big tech companies also use OKRs instead of the more traditional KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

OKRs are Conjoined Triangles of Success irl. Lots of companies use it around the bay (including Google).

They think it’s a godsend because suddenly they can measure their progress in some way that is not just “story points per sprint” ignoring the fact this measurement only makes sense within the system itself and may not reflect the reality at all.

A good thought exercise is to ask yourself, "Is it possible an engineer achieves every OKR yet is the worst employee at the organization?" and "Is it possible an employee achieves NO okr and is the best?"

I feel I could think of examples. There are so many dimensions of valuable work (no security holes, being nice, not reinventing the wheel, documenting well, long-term stability/refactorability, code being reusable by other teams) but I imagine OKRs can't cover all those facets.

It almost seems as fruitless as trying to measure friendship by OKRs.

Which is why okrs are untied from promos at Google for instance (in theory that is =))

Well most people don't set personal okrs, or at least not formally, so it's probably true that theory matches practice.

Both are possible, yep. But OKRs tend to be written down pretty often (quarterly is what I've seen, but maybe monthly is a thing too). If a bad employee is cruising or a great employee's work is not being recognized quarter after quarter, that's a direct managerial problem and not really what OKRs are trying to solve.

> If a bad employee is cruising or a great employee's work is not being recognized quarter after quarter, that's a direct managerial problem

management introduce OKRs so that they don't have to solve actual managerial problems - the OKRs _are_ their solution! That it misses a bad employee cruising, or a great employee's contribution is a footnote. After all, when the system is using an OKR to guide the actions of employees, and you go against it, it's basically career suicide.

I personally don't like OKRs or any performance metric that isn't directly tied to customers' actions (e.g., growing customer numbers, or growing revenue etc).

For this reason, Spotify now uses OKRs for teams and not people:

https://hrblog.spotify.com/2016/08/15/our-beliefs/

Where I work right now. They use OKR on division level.

At Time Out, we used to set OKRs at team level, and then prompty discard them and the carefully constructed plans that went nowhere when faced with the reality.

So now we're setting the Objectives, and measure the KPIs that are defined to reflect the objectives. The actual means to move the KPI, which would be the KR (key results) in OKRs, are no longer defined in quarterly planning sessions, but are selected and updated by the team during sprint planning.

This gives the teams a large independence in What they are doing while still maintaining business alignment and meaningful measurements.

From what I understand, that is the idea. KRs are the KPIs you are going to focus on each quarter.

why don't you give examples

Aside from it being somewhat nonsensical, the industry has been saying KPI for decades as have other industries.

Google at work OKRs guide: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/ste...

Anecdotal story: I know a company that is too messed up to measure/quantify key indicators so as a solution they switched from KPIs to OKRs.

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