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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

> But if someone is trying to game the system to make corporate believe they get everything done in record time, they can control the system to fake the times.

I find this so incredibly annoying. KFC and McDonald's near me have screens up saying when your order is being "prepared" and when it is "ready to collect", except the "ready to collect" column is totally useless because they always put it in "ready to collect" long before it is actually ready to collect.

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I think this is a side effect of "what is measured is managed", combined with people always trying to game systems. If you establish a system to measure how fast people make meals you're just going to get false estimates. The solution I've seen is to trust and then actually manage people if they aren't doing well.

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

Workers are instructed that they must get order times down. What's the best way to do that? Simply marking the order as done whether it is done or not. Numbers are soon looking good and the bosses are happy. Sure the customers aren't, but that was never the metric they were asked to track.

A Pizza shop near me recently got terminated by the franchise for faking their pizza delivery times to collect bonuses. It's only a matter of time before somebody is jailed for pizza delivery fraud.

I noticed the same thing at a Burger King here in Stockholm, Sweden. Very annoying to go to the counter and realize that your "ready" order is far from being so.

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