Quarterly and annual goals setting is all about telling a story to wall street. Executives are obsessed with chasing quarters because there are significant bonuses associated with meeting quarterly and annual targets, and so it is natural that goal setting permeates the whole company, because the C-Suite is in charge after all.

Quarterly and annual goals are largely irrelevant for staff who are engaged in creating new software because of the constant need to pivot as the market and solution are discovered via iterative attempts. That said, Wall Street is in love with MBOs/OKRs and companies would be dumb to not execute investor desired ceremonies.

My advice to software engineer ICs is to do the bare minimum workflow for MBOs/OKRs and try not to be discouraged by the obvious waste of time. Dev managers can best spend their time trying to keep the goals high level and achievable in a variety of ways so that distraction presented to the ICs is minimized.

Fundamentally the last thing you want is software engineers doing is screwing around trying to figure out how to shoe-horn some stupid MBO/OKR around the work they end up discovering, or even worse, the inverse.