Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I learned that 30 years ago. It seems to be one of those things that every generation needs to learn the hard way.

A reason why an effective team needs a few older guys who've been around the block a few times :-)

True. Unfortunately you then get a new VP who still believes in KPIs (or needs to demonstrate KPIs to his boss because that's the only thing upper management "gets") and then you're back to square one :(

It is fine to have KPIs. When KPIs go out of control it is a sign of culture issues, or whatever you want to call it.

KPIs are just that. Indicators. Temperature is an indicator of good climate. If someone's answer to "it is cold in here" is to put a lighter under the thermometer then the problem isn't the thermometer, right? It is the people who are confusing indicators from goals. And that is a culture thing.

If that is your climate though you can still recover from it (I know we are doing way better than before at least:)).

First steps are to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty in evaluations. The culture twist (when I have seen it) comes from "Noone recognises my work" -> "Lets define KPIs for your work" -> "I am not evaluated fairly, look at how much work I do compared to guys that are evaluated better" -> "Lets define guidelines for evaluations based on our KPIs" -> "Everyone (except me) is cheating to score high on the KPIs to get better evaluations" -> "We need better KPIs that can't be cheated on" -> "We are doing a whole amount of stupid stuff because people worry about KPIs".

I think the first two steps are fine. There is direct business value in being able to compare how you are doing compared to the previous month, or some other department or whatever.

The problem comes in the third step - once the KPIs determine how someone is evaluated, then you are in a downwards spiral, because now you are saying that how you get there isn't as important as getting there. To get out of that you need to embrace the ambiguity that comes with letting evaluations happen, and maybe be "unfair".

Basically - uncertainty in evaluations is better than defining evaluations on KPIs. Solve the uncertainly by more discussions and reasoning, not by more rules.

> If someone's answer to "it is cold in here" is to put a lighter under the thermometer then the problem isn't the thermometer, right? It is the people who are confusing indicators from goals. And that is a culture thing.

But you're not using indicators to do some kind of science, you're trying to use them to make decisions about who gets fired and who gets a raise.

If you're a self-interested human being, you're going to do whatever you can to make sure the indicator points to "give me a raise" not "throw my ass on the street." If the indicator is not a perfect measure of job performance, then you're going to let job performance slide to maximize the indicator.

I think we agree.

Thats the thing - the indicators when used right are used for science. Namely improvement of self or others. It gets harmful when they are solely used to determine if you should get a raise or get fired.

They can certainly be used to indicate problem areas i.e. "This guy is producing 50% less according to RANDOMKPI", does that make sense or do we need to fix something? But if they are used like "X is at 80% of RANDOMKPI, he will be fired if he is not at 90%" then they are harmful, obviously, because they dont take into account the much more important things like "X is at 80% of RANDOMKPI because he is unofficially the teacher of how to deal with anything in our payment systems, so he spends half his time helping out others, which adds way more value to us than if he was just implementing features" or whatever.

Once KPIs start to drive evaluations, you're down a slippery slope.

Thank you for your response. Unfortunately for me, I have zero influence on this decision process (in our case, the rabid hunger for "Leading Indicators"). I get shut down or over-ruled whenever I bring up how some level of ambiguity is unavoidable and it makes little sense to treat software engineering work like a factory process.

Having to suck it up and deal right now. I appreciate you reminding me that KPIs are just a tool. :)

In my experience it's been a ready flow of money -- people with funding (e.g. VCs, or upper management at a large firm) are able to advance an agenda that includes KPIs, and then you're back to square one. Somehow they're shielded from the learning at the grassroots. By this means learning processes are disrupted.

I agree. I abhor political talk on HN, but this resonated true with me when hearing the comparison of US troop operations in Iraq to that of Vietnam in those instance. The idea of kill counts, popular in Vietnam, and targeted assasinations by militant leaders in Iraq (made famous by the playing card where people were ranked) and general metrics based on opposition death counts. I reflected on this and wondered how so many officers who survived Vietnam and saw who defining performance metrics the wrong way come back to let the same or even courage it later as officers in Iraq is this recurring horror story in large org management. It scares me that these mistakes are repeated, from war to situations with far less consequence like software development. I am sure there are good psych articles for more details on such issues, and I have always been interested in why such problems recur.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com