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Comment by QuercusMax | Hacker News Reader

I got a minor reprimand in a performed review for having a slightly heated conversation in a public channel. In the past that company had been very open about communicating about negative stuff (our CEO emailed the entire company when he visited one of the hardware labs that was a mess), but the upper management started tamping down on anything negative, and one of the things that suffered was any sort of honest communication.

Kind of a ship of theseus situation culture wise - when the original leaders are all gone, did they pick good successors to fill their spots? Very often not.

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I got a major reprimand because I answered too many questions posted in the public channel. All in my area of expertise, mostly after hours.

At first they said it was "great". But it soon turned sour and resulted in "it seems like you spend too much time answering questions", and I should "focus" and "free up" that time to work on my assigned tasks.

Well, I don't answer anything anymore. In fact nobody does. It used to be that you got precise technical answers from someone directly working on the tool or problem you asked about. The previous CEO would sometime even answer themself. Not anymore.

Now people ask, but nobody answers. The rest has devolved into LinkedIn style self-promotions and announcements.

But now the layer of management above you can justify organizing meetings to "get aligned" and "communicate". Structurally, i see how it happens

This sometimes happens also when the original leaders are still present but they dont understand the effect the metrics are having on the entire company when it grows big.

Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of decreases.

If that does not work to isolate you as the leader from thr reality of your company then link their salaries to a metric like number of projects finished before or at deadline and watch how tech debt increases multiple folds and how everything is suddenly estimates are increasing all over the place.

Want people not to ask meaningful hard questions in All Hands? Just make sure anyone that seems critical be labeled as not culture fit and done. All questions are positive and nice. Make sure to always ask for name and disable any anonymous questions asked.

Not trying to say metrics are bad or they should not be used. But they are not pure functions :) they do have side effects and sometimes very large ones.

Indeed, it's called Goodhart's law. As soon as metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric.

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

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