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Comment by halgir | Hacker News Reader

If you have five different goals and only need to hit three of them, you're incentivized to focus all efforts on the three easiest ones, and ignore the other two entirely. Or if you only need to hit 80% of each, to go for all low-hanging fruit until hitting 80%, then shift focus.

Non-cynical colleagues will act in as much good faith as they believe the manager is doing when setting the goals. But Goodhart's law lurks everywhere.

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>If you have five different goals and only need to hit three of them, you're incentivized to focus all efforts on the three easiest ones, and ignore the other two entirely.

That assumes that the three "easiest" goals have known, straightforward, guaranteed ways of attaining them. Naturally there will be some uncertainty, some extrinsic factors, some good and bad luck that will get in that way of any of the goals, so ignoring two goals entirely all year risks that you catch some bad luck on one of your 3 "easiest" goals and don't end up hitting all of them.

>Or if you only need to hit 80% of each, to go for all low-hanging fruit until hitting 80%, then shift focus.

Does that sound so bad, if it's by design?

> Does that sound so bad, if it's by design?

Not at all. Just important to keep in mind when setting those goals.

If you need to hit 3/5 you need to set the goals so that they are easy enough to surely succeed. Maybe you fail two to make them look hard, after you know you passed three.

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