"The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output."
Who could possibly have predicted that happening?
Who could possibly have predicted that happening?
Predictably, everyone started talking in Slack like their jobs depended on it. Everyone was responding to everything. Instead of writing out a complete message and pressing enter, they'd send each fragment of the sentence as a new line.
The Slack leaderboard was never shown again. Unfortunately the habit remained because people were afraid they were going to be secretly judged by how much Slack activity they generated.
I expect the same thing is going to happen at companies who had token leaderboards. Once you've instilled that fear in people, they internalize the expectation.
No amount of "this isn't used for anything" will change that. It's inherent in human nature in the 21st century to believe any and all metrics will be used against them, and therefore must be gamed.
It's why you also have to set UNBELIEVABLY clear goals and have incentives tied to those goals. Incentives meaning money. If you want to measure things, measure them. But have clear, consistent, and meaningful goals tied to bonuses or something if you want a thing done correctly.
The answer is simpler on the surface: focus.
Generally the problem is the larger the firm’s operations, the harder it is to focus.
Apple is the only firm that has done well on this consistently and doesn’t have a huge grave yard of failures to show for it.
That says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
My argument is that in the 21st century, a time of great data use without deep understanding, any measure at all will inherently become a goal to be gamed.
It was an unreal experience.
Insanity
But yeah, it's like they've never actually met human beings...
It's surprising how often this principle is applicable.
Charles Goodhart :-)
> Oh wow! If I paid for this myself I would have spent a lot of money! Are other people spending as much as me? I’m going to create a leaderboard!
> Oh no, my misinformed manager is using the leaderboard as a slight of hand for work. I need to game this now.
Then the leaderboard is banned… I can’t see how this ever really goes up the chain beyond director.
Everyone except the executives who get paid millions to predict exactly that.
It's a hard job, someone has to not pay consequences for bad decisions.
He started being drastically more serious into AI in 2022, and 2023 and he has nothing to show for it.
Heck, he could have rented GPUs the way Elon did at this point and either mended the bleeding or stopped it, not sure how many he has, but it beats losing this badly.
If he doesn't wake up and learn how to business, I suspect he will lose his empire he's built up for himself.
"Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports"
https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-sell-excess-ai-computi...
Tech journalists have low opinion of people with actual skills who actually contribute to society, and when their opinions get posted here, it's often selectively echoed by people looking for a reason to feel smarter than the industry.
people who make it to managers tend to have bozo tendencies & are yes men.
before it was lines of code, Jira tickets closed. Now it's tokens spent.