Comment by cconstantine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cconstantine | Hacker News Reader

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The only thing that matters is revenue, and if it can't be easily measured against revenue it doesn't exist. I am so tired of this line of reasoning. It's poisoning the industry, ruining products, and sucking the joy out of work.

What about making a quality product because you have a passion for it? Nope, make a broken MVP and move on to the next customer.

If I can't maintain a metric until I can tie it to revenue, then I guess I don't get cpu usage on our database. Or disk usage. Or response time for anything that only employees touch. Bad data and errors are fine as long as no one complains. Actually, if we produce a shitty product long enough everyone will get used to it and stop complaining. If we stop measuring error rates we can stop wasting time on fixing things right? Tests and code refactors just get in the way of delivering that MVP. Rewards are doled out for fixing an outage, and preventing them is a cost-center to be eliminated.

On the flip side, now we've got KPIs for our ability to push things through the corporate bureaucracy. I didn't become a programmer so I can waste time estimating how long it'll take to produce a design doc that'll be useless by the time I get to implementation, just so a bureaucrat can decide if some deeply technical problem they don't understand should be fixed.

There has to be a better way.

Commerce is a vulgar endeavor.

Whatever nobility or higher morality finds within it, it's just an exception that slipped through the cracks.

Idealism towards the external world will always be met with defeat (you simply do not have the power to fight more than one battle, with one person).

The only thing left is to serve as a role model, standing tall and never wavering, for your values and ideals---so that those around you may follow in your footsteps, if they so wish.

Perhaps you could start by refusing to play the KPI game? What is anyone really going to do, besides through vacuous diatribes about being a "team player," and such nonsense. The only power these corporate constructs have is that which is surrendered to it.

I'm going to assume you're a business person.

Commerce is vulgar, but as long as you're making (b|m)illions off me could you let me do my thing? Stop taking things that work for tech folk, misapplying them to business concerns without any intellectual honestly and deciding they don't work for anyone. Metrics work. The problem you people have with them is that they are a branch of statistics and if there's one thing business folks love to do it's lie with statistics. It's all fun and games until you start lying to yourself and start seeing the negative consequences.

How do you propose I escape the KPI game? It's how I'm evaluated by people who pay me. It's become how you gain influence in an organization. I can't escape to another place, because they all operate this way now. More and more I'm seeing "tech" leaders, big and small, that are much better at playing the game than holding any kind of technical excellence.

I'm not looking for some idealized world. At this point, I'm looking to have some fun while I get taken advantage of.

I'm a cynical realist who held the same viewpoint as you: "everyone's a fucking liar. Can't they see all the shit that's being peddled is just bullshit?"

Then, I stopped worrying and loved the grift.

It's just a game to play.

I shelter my intellectual "honesty" and idealism within my side-projects.

For business? I play to win.

It's the only way I've found to stop myself from becoming a jaded hollow husk.

Escaping the KPI game? There are organizations that don't self-fellate with KPIs (rare, or impossible, as it may seem). I've found that the "corporate bullshit" curve follows the Dunning Kruger curve (with fat tails). You have the vast bulk of bullshit in the center, the average SME/Enterprise, where everyone is trying to peddle bullshit faster than their competition. On one end you have the "high-performance," "we're making obscene amounts of money, and we want to make even more" a la buyside high finance (note: there is a lot of "playing the game," but the game isn't as petty, because people have real shit to do, with a lot of money at stake). On the other end you have the "we're growing. We're making money, and we're busy getting more features out the door; we don't have time for this bullshit that pretends to be working" start-up type where everyone knows how much everyone else is "outputting." There's no room to coast; there's no layers upon layers of bureaucracy and bullshit metrics to disguise your actual worth to the org.

If neither of those two fit your temperament, then perhaps you should find a research outfit? There will still be games to play, however.

If you generally view most people as incompetent, and that you're constantly having to bear the brunt of the terrible decisions of those above you: you should start your own firm (or find more competent people to work with).

Revenue is frequently gamed, anyway. If you tell a large sales department that revenue must be maximized this year: all bonuses depend on total contract value, then they will happily destroy the profitability of every new contract. Selling 2 million widgets for the price that competitors charge for 500,000 widgets is easy.

During the first Internet boom, when telephone modems and $20/month all-you-can-eat ISPs were the hot thing, Lucent made the best point-of-presence device, the Ascend Max: very nearly everything you needed to get access for a town in one box. Lucent discovered that new ISPs had little startup cash but generated strong monthly recurring revenue, so Lucent financed the Max for the ISPs, with the highly in-demand Max itself as the collateral. After all, if an ISP collapsed, the used Max could be sold again at nearly full price.

Lucent didn't count on the entire ISP market consolidating.

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