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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yup, this is all big companies. And if the metrics are wrong, that's not your responsibility. The PM's and VP's that come up with them know that metrics are imperfect and have tradeoffs. Let them handle the tradeoffs. If you're impacting the metrics, then you're doing the job assigned to you.

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They 'know they are imperfect' if you bring it up, but they act like they are perfect. That is why it's better to move metrics than do anything actually beneficial, everyone is justifying their high performance review. If you hit your metrics your manager looks good, that means their manager is hitting their metrics, and so on. The people that suffer are the shareholders and users, but management is always optimizing to transfer as much wealth as possible from shareholders to themselves and you ride the coattails of that if you just chase metrics.

I'm pretty convinced that there's no set of metrics that can effectively capture productivity and business goals without being gamed. It seems to me that the only effective management system is a "web of trust" style system where middle managers have a lot more autonomy to make decisions based on their own judgement. Unfortunately it's hard to legally CYA if something goes wrong with that kind of setup and it has other vulnerabilities like being manipulated by sociopaths.

Overall, managing people at scale is always going to be a hard problem and it seems unlikely that technology will ever offer a satisfactory solution.

Self destructing measurement:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

All else equal, easy to capture proxies make good metrics; however, the point is that all else will not be equal.

Also, the CYAed version of web of trust is a “360 review”. Going all in on 360s is a good way to unleashing reality tv dynamics in a previously banal workplace.

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