Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

Bad metrics can wreck corporate cultures. Let’s attack the other straw man: metric-free orgs.

Symptoms:

- Resources (and credit and promotions) are given to the most articulate and outgoing rather than the most effective. (Marketing budget goes to the extrovert rather than the manager producing the best ROI)

- When dates slip, they slip a lot. The night before a release it’s announced that there will be a 3 month delay. (Bad for anyone having to explain “If it’s 3 months, why couldn’t you tell me that sooner?” to a customer)

- Unanticipated earnings and revenue misses. (Same issue as above, but bad to anyone talking to investors)

- Poor prioritization. Effort is spent on squeaky wheels versus high value problems. (Engineers spend time helping “that nice person in accounting” versus solving a customer problem that brings in hard money)

With all the things an exec needs to worry about, they can’t effectively operate without good data to drive decisions. Data needs to have human interpretation as well. Of course bad data can be worse than no data, but that’s another story.

> Resources (and credit and promotions) are given to the most articulate and outgoing rather than the most effective

Somewhat of a random anecdote, but the first time I realized this was when I was in HS. I participated in what you may call a "hackathon". It was really just a competition open to HS kids that involved building an app to a spec.

I was lucky I have a friend with absolutely amazing artistic abilities, who did a lot of work on our UI and logo and I confidently say we had the best work out of everyone we completed with, both in terms of appearance and functionality.

But when it came time to present our work, I noticed something, while I never doubted our technical competences basically everyone before us had public speaking ability on the level of a politician. Nearly everyone else slaughtered us in terms of being able to present their work to the judges.

At the end of the day, our technical and artistic abilities paid off well enough, placing us just barely high enough to move on to another level, but it was clear, even if we were technically solid, we had approached the competition all wrong. We probably could have placed higher with a worse application, but better presentation.

This is a great anecdote. You have got to be able to sell. If you can't–or you can't hire someone who can–you're dead in the water. It doesn't really matter how good your product is.

I'm not completely convinced. I'm sure it always helps, and I'm sure in many cases it's a necessity in order to sell the product.

I'd like to believe that there are some products that are good enough and solve pressing enough issues so as to sell themselves. It's probably a naive hope, but I like to cling to it.

I wish there were enough honesty in sales as to not leave such a sour taste.

I think the best way to handle that sour taste is to make a product that actually lives up to sales hype.

I get the rationale, but it's disproportionately easy to oversell a product than live up to sales hype. I'm assuming a scenario where sales hype is on the verge of being detached from reality. It's an abuse of both customer trust and developer trust.

There's probably some flip side of the coin where sales is being honest about what they were _told_ was delivered, but the product doesn't in actuality live up to what was committed to. In which case the development team should either up their QA standard or adjust what they've committed to developing.

I'm sure there's some possible healthy relationship where there's some sales hype that's used to motivate product improvement, but I haven't personally experienced it.

The Oracle model that everyone copied was “Oversell and eventually you can hire the engineers to make your product actually better than the competition”

It worked so well (where are Sybase and the other RDBMS makers?) that everyone else copied the playbook.

For intangible products with high switching costs it’s just more profitable for vendors to lie.

This low integrity process has taken me a long time to come to grips with, and makes me especially prudent as a buyer.

Apologies, but in my experience in the IT realm, I find this hope to be so naive as to be dangerous.

The possible silver lining is that there still exist millions of good problems to solve. But never ever expect solutions to be self-evident.

I certainly understand why you think it's naive -- I even think it's naive, and it's my hope. I don't understand how it's dangerous though, would you mind expanding on that?

> But never ever expect solutions to be self-evident.

I certainly don't _expect_ anything. I just hope that there are products out there that don't need sleazy sales tactics, and let the product show it's worth

hope != expectation. i expect to live a life with no shortage of disappointment ;)

Dangerous may be an overstatement, but maybe not: I think what I was really trying to say was something along the lines of:

In my opinion, right now in IT, "laypeople" don't have a good understanding of how bad things are in many respects, and how much better they could be in others. Moreover, there are a lot of effective "salespeople" in this space, and all this adds up to what I believe is a huge gap in perception and reality here. So the last thing I want is more belief that great IT comes along and saves us?

In days of yore, I worked for a company where the product basically did "sell itself".

Over 90% of people who did a demo/trial run bought the product.

Sadly, technology progressed, and the entire market went away. The same "Magic Quadrant"/Market space that Gartner made explicitly because of that product was retired some time back due to not being relevant.

What product space is that?

If you've ever had to sit through a presentation by an Oracle or SAP sales team, you know presentation matters more than quality :)

I actually envy their ability to sell, even when I know their product is crap and I resent being made to use it by executives who bought a slick sales pitch.

Big win for the API instrumentation team.

https://youtu.be/kHW58D-_O64

Very depressing. I love it.

Eh I think this can be true but there are also projects that just build great open source tools with minimal selling and slowly win over engineers then maybe up sell them a bit later.

These kinds of projects usually withstand the test of time where flashier projects often burn out because they aren’t good in practice.

Good engineers are always wary of flashy things and keep an eye on substance

The problem with selling is you have to know who you are selling to.

I once developed a tool that saved literal days of time every month by automating some very rote workflows. It was appreciated by everyone who had to do the work by hand.

When I tried to sell it to my bosses boss, I realized he literally didn't know a lick about our workflows, where the inefficiencies are, and how they could be remedied.

We could've been making toothbrushes for all he cared.

After a while, I pulled out the super fake looking 'bad bar goes down, good bar goes up' slide and his eyes lit up.

>After a while, I pulled out the super fake looking 'bad bar goes down, good bar goes up' slide and his eyes lit up.

This, right here, might be the most important lesson. Figure out the 1 or 2 things your boss's boss cares about. Show a single slide where the bad things go down and the good things go up. Have a couple of technical nerds that are trusted and agree with you. Bam. 10 minute promotion right there.

Oh. I'll add something. I'm the boss right now. I spend a lot of time trying to make it clear to my team what I care about so they can give me that 1 slide presentation.

I also spend plenty of time learning from my team why they care about stuff that I don't because they often care about important stuff (and I should, too)

Not really though. It's way more important to know what skills you lack. If you can't sell, make sure someone is with you for the ride who can. Sometimes these problems can easily be solved.

>>We probably could have placed higher with a worse application, but better presentation.

and now you know how consulting companies like Accenture stay in business ...

I still wonder though, as their presentations are not slick at all. It's usually incomprehensible copy/paste work without a clear message.

Like Nigerian scammers, you win in bult and let your customers filter themselves until you get Hertz

> better presentation

Note how very very good Steve Jobs was at presentation.

The famous "reality distortion field"! Deploying Jobs' charisma so effectively, call the Cupertino folks lucky that he didn't recruit for a semi-religious sect instead.

I'm glad he didn't go into politics.

Bill Clinton was one of the most charismatic people ever in US politics. I am happy he never turned to the dark side - he could have caused an awful lot of damage. I was never afraid of what he'd do while he was in office, though I often disagreed with him. He never seemed to want power for power's sake, unlike too many other politicians. As far as I can tell, he just wanted people to like him.

If you've ever merely been in a room with him, regardless of size of the crowd, this is hard to understate. I like to think of myself as a rational scientific kind of person, but I swear, he does something to huge rooms of people that feels like magic. I 100% felt the entire room get happier before I even knew that the reason for it was Bill was making his way through.

Yup, that's what I've heard about him. It's even more apparent when he's contrasted with his wife. He's tried to get her to take likability training, and I know she's taken body language training (you can see it by comparing video of her over the years), but it hasn't really gelled for her.

Bill would never, ever have made the "deplorables" gaffe.

I watch his presentations for clues how to make mine better. But I know I have no hope of ever being that good.

Good analogy and there are a lot of great points mentioned in sibling threads. There are so (so) many "quality" software projects out there which aren't tirelessly promoted, though (e.g. npm dependencies). There is potentially a (strong) bias towards "extroversion" in the "Western world|US" but I somewhat think it's just "our perception" that this is optimized for in organizations/individuals. This is fuzzy and there are a lot of counter arguments. When it comes to "marketing" and "building a product" it seems, ideally, they pair with synergy.

This is true of most hackathons in my experience, just to a lesser degree since each team is generally free to make whatever solution they see fit. It's all in the pitch–you can pitch an entirely theoretical app you made a couple UI mocks in Figma for or you can develop the app end-to-end. I've seen both methods be successful.

I personal prefer the route of making the app end-to-end, you get a big "wow" factor with judges when you let them drive the laptop and take it for a spin rather than just following the happy path yourself. But I also make sure to set aside time to practice pitching since a bad pitch will effectively ruin our chances.

I agree with you completely except on one part. Metrics is not the only solution to this. The other option, more difficult but more effective if you can pull it off, is for individual contributors to not make these mistakes in the first place.

Having executives fix the bad decisions by individual contributors is sort of treating the symptoms rather than the underlying cause. It adds extra work because now everyone has to produce numbers about their work in addition to work -- and some of the numbers might not be better than tea leaves, statistically speaking.

So how do you get ICs to make the correct decision? Training, ownership, free flow of information about strategy and market, involving everyone in setting the direction, etc. The opposite of the instinct of an executive going by the numbers.

----

To stave off an eventual misunderstanding: I'm not saying you shouldn't measure what you do, operationalise your definitions, define in advance when you reject your hypotheses etc. I'm just saying that producing these numbers for yourself and your peers is far more effective than doing it for someone removed from the day-to-day business because they don't have the same context and nuance.

I agree with everything you say. And bad numbers are awful. At some point of organizational size, executives can’t stay on top of everything and make good decisions without quantitative metrics.

That doesn’t mean making everyone full time metric gatherers. It doesn’t mean looking at the data uncritically. It doesn’t mean ignoring what you can’t measure. It does mean smartly measuring what you can.

The alternative solution is that executives don't make decisions, only coordinate between the people on the ground who have the necessary context to make decisions.

That works for 80% of the problems, and something that should be done. Some problems require optimizing for the whole rather than individual teams or departments. How do you allocate capital between business units if you aren’t measuring ROI? How do you decide what practices work best if you’re not measuring how people work and what they’re doing?

Not all functions are best evaluated through ROI, but if you're an executive whose hammer is ROI you'll start to look at everything as a liability. Free markets are generally better at allocating capital than central control. It's also more flexible in adapting to different measures of success.

Standardising work is especially important that it's done by the participants in said work, and not dictated from above. That can be done democratically.

Agree. Very few execs are good enough to base capital allocation decisions on gut feel alone though. “It feels like we are short on internal audit” versus “a firm our size should be doing these 10 audits per year. An audit takes $y and if we don’t do it, the consequences are measurable with Y….”

You keep saying you agree with me that executives should not make this type of decision and then you somehow circle back to how we can enable executives to make that type of decision. That's the opposite of what I'm saying! I'm not sure I understand what's going on there.

I’m saying both. I agree that not every call is an ROI decision, but execs need some data beyond feel for most capital allocation decisions.

> is for individual contributors to not make these mistakes in the first place.

Exactly. Is the individual contributor working on something different than what the metrics would describe because they are dumb and irrational? Or because their experience, domain knowledge, and good judgement give them an insight that the KPI wouldn't? People certainly can be dumb and irrational, but we should at least be open to the possibility that people who are up to their eyeballs in a problem domain know something about what "better" and "worse" look like that a number-cruncher doesn't.

While you're correct, all of these things happen in metric-driven organizations, too... often exacerbated by the obsessive metrics focus.

Yea zero metrics is death. Big sign of low IQ orgs.

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