Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

A past employer thought it was a good idea to put up a leaderboard of who sent the most Slack messages. They celebrated the people at the top for being so active.

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.

View on HN

Reminds me of the place I worked at where I got in trouble because I was the only person writing JIRA tickets. Instead of bitching out the product manager or the tester for not writing tickets, they just complained to me. And if I wrote a ticket about how we could speed up the 40 minute build to 15 minutes I'd have to explain "How does this change improve the customer experience?" to which I answered "If the build was faster the customer would have had the product six months ago"

I worked somewhere that made time from PR being sent for review and ready to merge be a metric for the reviewers. Not time to add feedback in each round. Total time elapsed.

Insanity

You have to realize that if you set a measure, you're actually setting a goal for your employees. There is no such thing as a meaningless metric; why else would you measure it?

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.

I wonder if this should be codified as a rule of thumb, or an unofficial "law"? One perhaps we can reference easily among our peers.

You mean like Goodhart's Law? (Unless you're being sarcastic)

That's close but not quite.

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.

I worked at a place that argued that nobody would game the metrics because it would be wrong and they never stated what the metrics were… while I was gaming the metrics and they were praising me for being one of the best on the team.

It was an unreal experience.

How did you realize what the metrics were?

Kinda.

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.

Are you saying what people are hoping to achieve with stupid goals? Because yeah, obviously. But the point is that they're stupid, so they don't achieve that, and that failure is 100% knowable in most scenarios.

PUBLIC graveyard

This will inevitably be allocated like other budgets, and from talking to Meta folks about GPU budgets, it is going to be brutal.

"when a measure becomes a goal, it stops being a measure"

It's surprising how often this principle is applicable.

What is about silicon valley leaders not understanding basic economics or business management? These kind of cargo cult tactics would not fly in any other industry.

These kind of cargo cult tactics show up in all kinds of businesses.

But yeah, it's like they've never actually met human beings...

Give an example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com