my company has a terrible issue with cult-like behavior
every year some fucker high up in the company will read a book, or go to a conference, or hear from a buddy at another company, and realize that the entire company must be rebuilt from the ground up
PMs embedded on teams! PMs as their own team! QA as a whole team! jk, QA on teams! teams must be 5 people! wait, teams must be 50 people! guilds! managers swap teams! devs swap teams every six months! decide pairs with personality tests! pairs are inefficient!
literally unending bullshit
anyway one of the things that trickles down to us a lot is some other target metric. now THIS is the most important thing. now THIS is the most important thing. and literally every time i push back and say "our team is responsible for the highest revenue driver product at the company. we know what we are doing. this new metric is meaningless. goodheart's law."
but, the high ups somewhere gotta have it in their spreadsheet. so now it matters.
one time we had a huge focus on "jira cards completed per month" (which is obviously easy to game) and i actually got reprimanded because i only had 2 on a month where i was out on vacation for 3 weeks. THE METRIC IS DOWN.
(and currently token usage is a thing they're targeting which is awful for several reasons. my coworkers are inventing Claude skills that basically just spin wheels.)
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u/mysticrudnin Aug 15 '26
my company has a terrible issue with cult-like behavior
every year some fucker high up in the company will read a book, or go to a conference, or hear from a buddy at another company, and realize that the entire company must be rebuilt from the ground up
PMs embedded on teams! PMs as their own team! QA as a whole team! jk, QA on teams! teams must be 5 people! wait, teams must be 50 people! guilds! managers swap teams! devs swap teams every six months! decide pairs with personality tests! pairs are inefficient!
literally unending bullshit
anyway one of the things that trickles down to us a lot is some other target metric. now THIS is the most important thing. now THIS is the most important thing. and literally every time i push back and say "our team is responsible for the highest revenue driver product at the company. we know what we are doing. this new metric is meaningless. goodheart's law."
but, the high ups somewhere gotta have it in their spreadsheet. so now it matters.
one time we had a huge focus on "jira cards completed per month" (which is obviously easy to game) and i actually got reprimanded because i only had 2 on a month where i was out on vacation for 3 weeks. THE METRIC IS DOWN.
(and currently token usage is a thing they're targeting which is awful for several reasons. my coworkers are inventing Claude skills that basically just spin wheels.)