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Comment by novia | Hacker News Reader

I made a high score list for my team to get people to care about catching bugs during code review.

The gamifying started immediately.

If you ever make anything competitive there will be that one guy trying to cheat his way to the top.

The high score list was supposed to be for finding logic errors. This guy was trying to pass off finding typos in text strings as equivalent to finding something that would blow up prod if pushed up.

I really... hate... reality

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If you implement a game, people would play the game. (which is better than if they ignored it)

I would have thought that software engineers, of all people, would understand that one's intention and what they actually implemented in a system can be two different things, and careful effort must be expended to properly implement it, and that "good intentions" alone is not sufficient.

There's playing the game as intended and playing to the rules. People who insist on doing the latter even after being asked not to are infuriating. I've got one friend who got himself permanently uninvited from board game night for these sorts of shenanigans.

Did you try to analyze afterwards why your subordinates tried to do extra work, in that particular case? Maybe they thought that their performance (aka livelihood) would be tied to that leaderboard? And why would they have such a thought? I have some suspicions about the root cause of the issue :)

I was an IC procrastinating on my real work, not a manager. I think I implemented this in Github during my first sprint on the team. Managers are probably wise enough to the way of humans to not attempt something like this (Goodhart's Law and all that). I know as a fact my peers started pointing to the high score list I made as a way to start justifying asking for raises and things like that, to demonstrate that they were pulling their weight on the team harder than others.

This isn't always true, if it makes you feel better.

In order for a game like this (what you described is a type of game) to work, all players need to have the same level of trust vectors toward the other players. This type of situation only emerges in very localized instances. The military, for example.

1. Don’t make the game unless you can enforce the rules.

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