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I have never been involved in an okr system that wasn’t an utterly pointless waste of time that no one but hr and back office people took seriously.

dpflan 8y ago
What was a common theme among all the systems that you think contributed to their pointlessness?
- empath75 8y ago
  They were almost entirely unconnected with the work I was actually doing, and nobody cared them until 3 days before they were due.
  - asark 8y ago
    Similar experience. We (the devs) quickly realized we'd need a ton of time to create useful metrics for our dev teams and that we'd need a shit-load of historical data we didn't have to give them any context—lots of small- to medium-size projects of many different types, hard to reason about one based on another except with a mountain of data from all of them to treat in aggregate. And it might still just be tea-leaf reading. Probably would be, in fact. And of course we didn't have the time to do that. So we found ways to tie social media marketing stuff (views are the easiest thing to measure!) to higher-level OKRs and did that instead, usually rushing to get it done right before the deadline. It was not a good use of software developer salaries. An initiative to at least start collecting the data we needed so it might be useful in 2-3 years could have been, but some OKRized version of "start collecting data to use in OKRs 12 quarters from now" wasn't something anyone would get behind and was pretty much impossible to tie to the higher-level OKRs that were being set. Whole thing was a game to find something easy to measure that could be made to look useful, whether it was or not. It wasn't some huge disaster or anything and I can see how maybe in exactly the right organization it might work, but there's no way it was the right place for that company to spend their money.
- patejam 8y ago
  We do quarterly OKRs. Quarterly deadlines are completely arbitrary and my actual deadlines aren't tied to the quarters. So I (and everyone around me) don't take them seriously. We take the actual deadlines seriously. The only thing OKRs seem to do is provide direction to the higher ups about what my team is up to.
  - 6nf 8y ago
    Yes so you have no actual incentive to focus on OKRs. You're doing the work required to keep the company running but the quarter's OKR goals only gets attention if you think it will help your actual job. Is that what you mean?
  - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    I don't think anyone expects OKRs to do more than that. Direction to the higher-ups is a valuable thing, and it's not trivial to reliably get it.
smudgymcscmudge 8y ago
My experience is similar. We all know what work needs to be done, but instead of just doing it, we end up having to come up with how it aligns to OKRs or KPIs or whatever they’re calling them that quarter.
caprese 8y ago
thank you, I felt like I was in the twilight zone at the last company I worked out that used these I started working from coffee shops until they just dropped the OKR system and every manager wasting the whole company's time on it had "moved on for personal reasons" I had forgotten about this repressed nightmare, I'll remember that next time I am fawning over the hip location and catered meals
honkycat 8y ago
There is a lot of toxic cargo cult OKR / Agile / all other forms of management. The point of OKRs is to make sure you are actually working on relevant projects and not burning time on something nobody actually wants or needs. Happens much more than you would think. No amount of process is going to fix brain-dead management.

dpflan 8y ago

What was a common theme among all the systems that you think contributed to their pointlessness?

empath75 8y ago
They were almost entirely unconnected with the work I was actually doing, and nobody cared them until 3 days before they were due.
- asark 8y ago
  Similar experience. We (the devs) quickly realized we'd need a ton of time to create useful metrics for our dev teams and that we'd need a shit-load of historical data we didn't have to give them any context—lots of small- to medium-size projects of many different types, hard to reason about one based on another except with a mountain of data from all of them to treat in aggregate. And it might still just be tea-leaf reading. Probably would be, in fact. And of course we didn't have the time to do that. So we found ways to tie social media marketing stuff (views are the easiest thing to measure!) to higher-level OKRs and did that instead, usually rushing to get it done right before the deadline. It was not a good use of software developer salaries. An initiative to at least start collecting the data we needed so it might be useful in 2-3 years could have been, but some OKRized version of "start collecting data to use in OKRs 12 quarters from now" wasn't something anyone would get behind and was pretty much impossible to tie to the higher-level OKRs that were being set. Whole thing was a game to find something easy to measure that could be made to look useful, whether it was or not. It wasn't some huge disaster or anything and I can see how maybe in exactly the right organization it might work, but there's no way it was the right place for that company to spend their money.
patejam 8y ago
We do quarterly OKRs. Quarterly deadlines are completely arbitrary and my actual deadlines aren't tied to the quarters. So I (and everyone around me) don't take them seriously. We take the actual deadlines seriously. The only thing OKRs seem to do is provide direction to the higher ups about what my team is up to.
- 6nf 8y ago
  Yes so you have no actual incentive to focus on OKRs. You're doing the work required to keep the company running but the quarter's OKR goals only gets attention if you think it will help your actual job. Is that what you mean?
- SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
  I don't think anyone expects OKRs to do more than that. Direction to the higher-ups is a valuable thing, and it's not trivial to reliably get it.

smudgymcscmudge 8y ago

My experience is similar. We all know what work needs to be done, but instead of just doing it, we end up having to come up with how it aligns to OKRs or KPIs or whatever they’re calling them that quarter.

caprese 8y ago

thank you, I felt like I was in the twilight zone at the last company I worked out that used these I started working from coffee shops until they just dropped the OKR system and every manager wasting the whole company's time on it had "moved on for personal reasons" I had forgotten about this repressed nightmare, I'll remember that next time I am fawning over the hip location and catered meals

honkycat 8y ago

There is a lot of toxic cargo cult OKR / Agile / all other forms of management. The point of OKRs is to make sure you are actually working on relevant projects and not burning time on something nobody actually wants or needs. Happens much more than you would think. No amount of process is going to fix brain-dead management.