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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

One of the downfalls of OKRs is that in many cases the true objective for people and/or teams is not something that can be mentioned without being unspeakably impolite. For example, the political goal "I as CTO want my department to grow by N FTEs so that I will gain in prestige compared to my peers in the C-suite" is definitely not something you will ever see on an OKR sheet but is definitely something that happens. On the other end of the influence spectrum, "I want to learn technology X because it will look good on my resume when I job-hop in a year from now" is also something you can't really use as a reason in a corporate setting but still definitely something that happens all the time.

If you cannot start from the real Objectives and have to make up fake ones, determining effective Key Results to go with them is bound to lead to confusion.

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This hidden agenda issue can be very problematic, as you say it might be self-evident based on watching people leave that they've gone somewhere else for the "better" tech stack but you'll unlikely to get anyone to admit to it, unless you're working somewhere progressive and/or with a progressive manager etc.

My last place we intentionally didn't use K8s but we were upfront with our team and hires (it was almost one of the first things I mentioned when recruiting) along with the reasoning.

But unless people are honest about their motives, and this is something that has to cascade down from the top, you'll get all sorts of sabotaging behaviour, especially if OKRs are imposed from the top and not bought into/negotiated across the org.

This gets worse when (due to human psychology and fast brain/slow brain traits, with the slow brain backing up the knee jerk fast brain) goals like the ones you mention are hidden (in shadow - see Jung). Or as mentioned in other comments you get the whole Economics externalisation problem when all sorts of 2nd and 3rd order+ goals (like team/org cohesion, fixing technical debt, taking ownership of incidents/problems or going the extra mile) which aren't in any of the OKRs get gamed out of the system because no-one's tracking them. This would be fine if the OKRs are light touch guides and not excuses to stick everything else on the bonfire. i.e. OKRs are in service and not master.

I'm not sure how you mitigate this other than hiring people aligned with company values/goals/action who are less likely to just be (understandably because it's a jungle out there) maximising their pay and the modernity of the tech stacks they know and foster a culture of co-operation not competition.

> I'm not sure how you mitigate this other than hiring people aligned with company values/goals/action who are less likely to just be (understandably because it's a jungle out there) maximising their pay and the modernity of the tech stacks they know and foster a culture of co-operation not competition.

I’m not sure it’s possible to grow beyond a small group of people and actually maintain that. People would need to feel some significant ownership in the company and you can’t spread a meaningful amount ownership across hundreds or thousands of people. And that’s after the investors and execs take their cut

That's an interesting angle, which I guess would tie in with 1) Nassim Taleb's Skin in the Game concept [1] which would seem to be analagous in some sense to creating community,

2) but sabotaged by a general (lack of) friction in people's ability to move jobs (I'm averaging about 2 years now per company, down from 4-5 years around 20 years ago) and this isn't seen as a negative.

3) This obviously can create large internal friction, especially when every new person brings new challenges (or fads) to the strategic direction such that you can spend more time changing (tooling or process or organisation structure) than actually doing real work.

4) As mentioned in a recent post here, this tendency to pay market rate for new hires, but not to pay market rates to more productive people already working for you also exacerbates this, but everyone just shrugs and plays the game because no-one's invested enough in the process to challenge it (or those that are and do just get labelled as awkward).

So it's interesting the "fetish" for OKRs in many spaces that can make people look good, but how often do they actually track the actual "costly" actions like

a) perpetual people leaving -> hiring -> training/getting up to speed cycles

b) or number of hours wasted in meetings or context switching due to interruptions or

c) deciding to outsource something you've just spent 9 months insourcing to a different company than the original one you insourced from at great financial/opportunity cost (assuming they even succeed and it doesn't take 3 attempts) etc.?

d) Let's rewrite everything in new tool X I need on my CV because you won't pay me market rate so I'm now looking after myself...

Without surfacing these costs, how can you make effective decisions???

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chKZ5BVxTfY

Speaking for the devil -- that's going to happen anyway, but OKRs will force to put that into a framework, to come up with a reasonably looking excuse to do that. Better with excuse than without, no?

> in many cases the true objective for people and/or teams is not something that can be mentioned without being unspeakably impolite

At the individual contributor level the manager is always pushing for “personal OKRs” too

And I’ve never been able to be honest or “authentic” about that

Nobody could ever explain if it was professional development goals, extra responsibility or goals within the company or coding project, or actual personal. Other ICs would be excited to write their actual personal.

It's funny.

When it comes to personal development, side projects, etc. I have had times when I was very interested in setting specific goals and other times when I really didn't want to.

I totally hate that bullshit. The last time I ran into this "personal goal setting" nonsense was at a company where I wasn't planning on staying around very long. You could say it was rather challenging to be authentic.

What kind of goals did you choose, that time?

I just told them what they wanted to hear, like "promoting knowledge sharing through brown bag sessions" with no intention of ever doing it.

Ok :-) I wonder if team/department goals would have been more fun in your case

I was unhappy there after the first month, so any sort of goals would've been pointless. Don't get me wrong, I did decent work and would receive excellent reviews / praise for it, I just didn't like the culture / environment.

The honest truth: I didn't have any goals, and still really don't. I just wanted good, interesting work to do during these dark times (pandemic, etc), with as few interruptions as possible.

Whenever someone asks that question I tell them my personal goal is to make more money. Ironically this sometimes leads to productive conversations.

This is the dream response for any manager. I am the opposite and cared very little about making more money. I was more interested to reduce my life's operational expenses to get more out of the money I was already making. I got bounced around from manager to manager because of this. Nobody knew how to get me to do anything.

“I want to make more money” is an easy thing for a manager at a not-failing company to handle because it is so concrete and concretely deliverable.

> If you cannot start from the real Objectives and have to make up fake ones

The more you understand the real motivation of people the harder it gets to take business goals and decisions seriously.

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