Not even engineers; this is true of all business. Any metric defined quickly becomes a goal whether it was intended to or not. Once you attach incentives to the metric, it will be focused on to the exclusion of everything else.
Easier said than done, but if you can manage to set up the metric to align the business and the employee, life becomes very easy for management. Working on designing and implementing production-based pay systems in warehouses, when it goes right the department runs itself with barebones management as a little profit generating machine that fairly pays workers a very good wage. When it goes wrong though...
Yeah, the problem comes in when the dynamic changes and you’ve overoptimized for the old dynamic and don’t have any ability to flex within the systems without totally overhauling them. Hence the current supply chain problems…