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Comment by jabedude | Hacker News Reader

What does "KPI" mean in this context? Never heard the term before

Key Performance Indicator: ie, someone at huawei’s job performance review depends on “made N open source contributions to major projects”, and Goodhart’s Law strikes again.

Came to the comments to learn what KPI was. And leaned about Goodharts law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Saving someone a click

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

And ironically, earned 3 points of HN karma kreds for this very tiny contribution to the discussion. Oh the deep irony in this particular context of KPI spamming.

HN posts/karma are probably going to come up in his next performance review!

You are one of today's lucky 10,000! https://xkcd.com/1053/

"Key Performance Indicator". I believe the implication here is that some people from Huawei are sending useless patches just to pad their performance values and look better inside the company.

Indeed... although I'd point the blame more squarely at management deciding that "number of patches" is the right way to measure someone's performance.

Not that I have any idea if that's the case here, but I've worked in places like that. Idiotic approach.

Key Performance Indicator. The implication is that some Huawei engineers are rewarded for contributing to the kernel.

key performance indicator? kernel programming interface?

I too ponder the meaning.

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