7 ms·

I get that its immeasurably frustrating for a person to be distilled into performance metrics, but how else can we measure one's impact? Using a trust based met

I get that its immeasurably frustrating for a person to be distilled into performance metrics, but how else can we measure one's impact? Using a trust based method where a supervisor leans on their personal biases to determine an employee's value is fraught with issues as well. A large enough corporation is a machine and we can't base decisions off of how we "feel" the machine's parts are working. Hard numbers will win over time.

jdc 7y ago
I think it really comes down to how well-designed the performance model is. And averaging a handful of survey answers sure as hell doesn't cut it.
Nasrudith 7y ago
The alternative is management who knows the domain well enough to understand those they supervise. That is expensive and hard in itself to ensure reliably. It is a matter of the push and pull of scale advantages at varied sizes essentially which is essentially universal but varies by domain.
lazyjeff 7y ago
Professors have been teaching and getting student course evaluations since forever. At institutions and roles where the admin knows little about the subject, they rely more on the course evals. At institutions with more engaged faculty and with more serious teaching, course evals are less prominent and defer to other forms of assessment (faculty observations, teaching statements, etc.).
- jld 7y ago
  Historically professors have tenure (admittedly less so now, I believe), so how they score on evaluations has no real bearing on them keeping their jobs. I had a professor who was a terrible lecturer, and he knew his student evaluations were terrible every time. As he handed out the evaluations he would tell us that he did not read them, and did not care what we wrote. I graduated twenty years ago, but just checked the department's website. He's still employed!
  - lazyjeff 7y ago
    Fair enough, but even the tenured professors were untenured at some point before so they did matter and were not problematic enough to deny tenure. And tenure doesn't really apply the same for adjuncts or some lecturers, who are perhaps even more dependent on student evals. And of course it depends on the seriousness the university takes teaching, as there are R1s that are more research oriented and care less about teaching, but they account for 1% of all universities.
    - virtuous_signal 7y ago
      Even as a grad student, my teaching evaluations couldn't negatively affect me. The only people it could have real, negative consequences for were instructors, who work on contracts. As an example, my department head (perhaps unintentionally) sent everyone an email saying any scores of less than 3.73 on a 1-7 scale were grounds for termination of that instructor's contract. I did not envy them at all, basically being highly educated customer service workers.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  Every large-scale student evaluation I have ever seen has been massively uninformative because students on different courses usually have drastically different expectations. At my university, the law school was top-notch (at least, it is the best in the country) and it got the lowest score by far every year. Why? High expectations, huge number of students competing hard. The best school? Theology. Why? Low expectations, not many students in a far less competitive environment (And I studied in both and in probably four or five faculties across the school...Law was the best, Theology the worst...not even close, the former had people from Law firms, you got full feedback on everything...the latter, you usually got no feedback on any work). This is really the point...now, you can do some kind of grouped mean model or you can compare over time...but what is the actual point? The reason they do this (or did this at my uni) was to compare departments/courses...but everyone knew it was bullshit...people lost jobs (I actually met the Dean who masterminded this, he came from the private sector, taught a minor course in the business school, and was utterly clueless).
- analog31 7y ago
  Conventional wisdom is that student course evaluations are primarily driven by the grades that students expect to receive. There is strong pressure to give out easy grades. I overheard two professors who were teaching different sections of the same course, get into a shouting match over grades. One of them was up for tenure, and wanted to give easy grades. He was quite explicit about this.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  Course evaluations have no meaningful relationship to actual learning: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191491X16300323 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01914... The usual argument that has been given in favour of evaluations is to show a correlation with final exam scores. The two problems being (1) small samples and (2) soft-ball exams leading to higher evaluation scores. Humans are not able to accurately evaluate their own learning. When we experience fluency or are entertained, we substitute those attributes for the attribute of ability to recognise or recall information.
vraivroo 7y ago
Yes, you've described why large corporations are hated. It's quite obvious that a handful of numbers are incapable of measuring a person's true impact, yet by god, they insist on trying.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  To be fair, metrics are often insisted upon by unions in order to not allow people to be fired based on the company's feelings about them. They're also insisted upon by courts to adjudicate wrongful termination cases as well as discrimination cases.
- tcbawo 7y ago
  All businesses want good employees, but what they want most are employees that can be replaced if necessary. They hire people to accomplish tasks and add value. I have felt underappreciated in corporate roles before, but then I realized that I was attaching too much of my identity to my job and in something where I had no real equity. Since then, I am much better at separating work from personal life, and I am happier putting my personal interests above the company's.
  - VRay 7y ago
    Yeah, I was a lot less upset about some of the crappy experiences I'd had working for evil giant companies after I read "The E-Myth Revisited". My elite 10 person team was doing a great job on Device A, while Device B had a team of 200 semi-skilled foreign contractors just barely keeping things on track. Then, somehow, the company decided to reorg my super-skilled team and promoted the leader of the contractor team. From 3-4 levels up in the company, the Device A team and the Device B team were IDENTICAL. They were both delivering things on time and under budget, even though team A was costing the company 1/5th as much, they were both fine. These products were generating hundreds of millions of dollars or maybe even billions in revenue per year, so the difference $5 million/year and $25 million was irrelevant. If I'd realized this sooner, I wouldn't have put so much effort into doing a great job at the expense of my own interests, and it would've been just fine
- 7y ago
hhs 7y ago
> I get that its immeasurably frustrating for a person to be distilled into performance metrics, but how else can we measure one's impact? I think it may also be useful to talk about the reliability and validity of all the things that are measured. Also, how useful is this stuff among the different fields? The article talks about gig workers and manufacturers. Would be interesting if these metrics were applied rigorously to other fields like politicians, talk show pundits, and forecasters.
- mjfl 7y ago
  This was the basic premise behind the book "Expert political judgement" by Phil Tetlock.
  - hhs 7y ago
    Thanks for the reference.
    - jacques_chester 7y ago
      It's an outstanding read. His followup Superforecasters was co-authored with a journalist for a more popular audience, but still fascinating.
- onceUponADime 7y ago
  No, no, this rigorious ratings are for lower class endavours. Higher classes get a title, which is a one off rubber stamp of quality and then will never again be judged on performance standing alone. Dr. Senior. Dipl. Ing. Except by there peers, who will lower a silk of omerta over "internal" affairs like a lack of quality in work. Of course, between these professions, there are meta-power struggles, which will play out, in a court- stylized fashion, a eternal ritualized war between castes like "management" and "technical execution". Metrics, as demanded by one caste, are worthless, as they rely on a working interface provided by the oppossition or in depth knowledge, making a allegiance two too factions necessary. Thus all that remains of them is a ritualized insistence, to compensate for the creeping feeling of a lack of controll. For those who need them, can not get them and be certain they are accurate. Making metrics, actually - a flag of truce.
ceejayoz 7y ago
> how else can we measure one's impact? This is a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism. We must do something This is something Therefore, we must do this.
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  Not to be confused with "Do something, even if it's wrong" which is how you break out of analysis paralysis.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  A fave. See also: Don't just do something, stand there! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/22/stand-there/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/22/stand-there/
grawprog 7y ago
>A large enough corporation is a machine A machine in which the parts of are made up of humans with 'feelings'. Distilling human beings down to cogs in a machine is bad enough when it comes from executives. This belief that corporations are some kind of non-human machine like entity is part of why the world's so fucked today. Maybe the world would be a better place if corporations weren't run as inhuman machines with no care or regard to their employees or the world in which they operate.
- jiggliemon 7y ago
  > This belief that corporations are some kind of non-human machine like entity is part of why the world's so fucked today. What point in history are you arguing was less fucked than it is today?
  - lstamour 7y ago
    Before corporations were people, in the US at least? http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history-corporations-us/ http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history... Not at all going to claim it as ideal, but it's a starting point for considering other possible alternatives to today's giant, faceless corporations where nobody within the corporation is easily held accountable, etc.
3pt14159 7y ago
I think the core problem is having one universal metric. Take Uber or Lyft as an example. Some people like silence, some like conversation, some like music. If the ML models were better or if it were based on a web of trust we wouldn't need to have a score that treats a 4.5 as universally better than a 4.6 or similar.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
hogFeast 7y ago
You should have more than one supervisor (and solicit information from peers). But basically...yes...using judgement, learning how to assess skills...that is all part of management. You cannot turn a bad manager into a good one with information. I have seen no evidence that "hard numbers" work (they aren't "hard"...there is usually almost no justification for a particular metric). And it feeds on innumerable human biases (inability to confront uncertainty, using "hard" information to justify an emotional conclusion, creating meaningless targets, etc.). In my experience, the practical issue is two-fold: one, people are just going to do what they do anyway but they ignore warnings signs/are more unflexible and two, you optimise for data that is obvious, collectable, and (usually) completely irrelevant. This is a trend, it will pass as all these trends do. It started off as quite a good idea (businesses were often failing to set targets or quantify success/failure) and has just got totally out of control.
moksly 7y ago
I work in the public sector where the pendulum is always swinging between trust and control. It's partly because we're not entirely driven by MBA's and our success criteria isn't earning shareholders value, but it's mainly because we've been around for so long because we can't go bankrupt when we fail. There are advantages and disadvantage to both approaches. In a system of trust the key benefits are better products, happier employees who have less sick days and stick around longer, more creativity and new solutions that are appreciated by the community. The downside is that some employees, managers or contractors are going to take advantage of the trust in such a terrible way that you'll have no option but to swing towards control once the media finds out. A good example from my country is a decade back, when we had a lot of trust in our public sector and an elderly care facility was saving money by putting dirty diapers back on the elderly if the urine in the diapers didn't weigh enough. Crazy, right? But that's the stuff that happens with trust, you'll also see managers contracting out procurement contracts to companies they own themselves and other stuff like that. On the opposite side you have the MBA based approach where everything is streamlined, measured and conformed. This is where you can build two hospitals for the price of 1,2 because the plan for them are exactly the same. It's where you LEAN every single business process up, and harvest the benefits. It's efficient, clean, and it slowly exhumes your business of value. Because the MBA approach very rarely manages to create something new, it's just really great at maximizing your current system. Eventually a neighboring city is going to do something wild, like figure out how to completely wipe out dyslexia by trying some crazy new method, because they trusted some hippie teacher with a plan. This is where you're forced to swing back toward trust and value tradeskills (not sure if this is the right word in English) because your politicians can't survive another period of having the highest dyslexia numbers in the country and nothing in the MBA playbook can help them. This is a little simplified of course, and I'm certain things are different in the private sector, but I dare say, that if your organisation sticks around for long enough, it's bound to see the pendulum swing between those two outlines.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  I think the bigger issue with the MBA approach is it's always possible to trade a little bit of long term hard to measure value for short term profits.
taurath 7y ago
Hard numbers have been winning, and thats been the problem. Any time you have a set of numbers to describe a thing, you're creating an imperfect model of that thing. When you only consider that imperfect model, the things moves in the direction of fulfilling that model. You can't say you care about employee well-being, unless you have a metric, or several metrics, it won't ever be done.
Consultant32452 7y ago
I'm a bit on the spectrum and I absolutely love having my performance distilled down to a set of metrics. It clearly communicates to me which types of actions are valued in a way that I will often miss from normal social interactions due to my blindness to social queues. The way I perceive work is very helpful in this regard. To me, the purpose of work is to maximize my income/lifestyle while not dipping below a lower bound threshold of misery. I don't seek personal or emotional fulfillment from work at all. I did that when I was younger and, for me, it was a bad way to approach life. This way I'm much happier and my focus/attention is more on the kinds of things I hope will wind up in my obit: family, relationships, charity, etc. I wonder if sales people ever write articles about how they're at the "mercy" of their sales metrics. The idea of it seems hilarious.
- VRay 7y ago
  It's all well and good until you get judged by a bunch of completely borked-up, unfair metrics. The computer sets you to running halfway across a gigantic warehouse again and again, then measures your "picks per hour" vs somebody who consistently ends up in a tiny corner of the warehouse. Your manager agrees that it's not a problem and tells you not to worry, then a few months down the line some algorithm decides to give your lucky coworker a big raise and you don't get a boost at all. Thankfully I haven't had to deal with any metrics like this for more than a couple of months at a time.. Since engineers' specialty is to optimize ratings, it's an obvious-enough waste of time to apply them that they're usually short-lived.
CKN23-ARIN 7y ago
> how else can we measure one's impact? Goodhart's law suggests that this is impossible.
closeparen 7y ago
Yet people who passed laboratory science classes in college, people who should really know better, choose to govern by the metrics they "feel" are causally related to outcomes. Maybe you really do have a formula that outperforms a panel of subject matter experts. It does happen sometimes. Not for long, because the experts start using it. But the bar for making this kind of claim is, at minimum, peer-reviewed experimental results that reproduce. Human experience is a rich dataset. Intuition is a sophisticated machine. It blows my mind that people will so easily dismiss all of that in favor of a few bits of information and some 3rd grade arithmetic they just made up. It's not scientifically rigorous just because there's a table and a graph. Come on!

jdc 7y ago

I think it really comes down to how well-designed the performance model is. And averaging a handful of survey answers sure as hell doesn't cut it.

Nasrudith 7y ago

The alternative is management who knows the domain well enough to understand those they supervise. That is expensive and hard in itself to ensure reliably. It is a matter of the push and pull of scale advantages at varied sizes essentially which is essentially universal but varies by domain.

lazyjeff 7y ago

Professors have been teaching and getting student course evaluations since forever. At institutions and roles where the admin knows little about the subject, they rely more on the course evals. At institutions with more engaged faculty and with more serious teaching, course evals are less prominent and defer to other forms of assessment (faculty observations, teaching statements, etc.).

jld 7y ago
Historically professors have tenure (admittedly less so now, I believe), so how they score on evaluations has no real bearing on them keeping their jobs. I had a professor who was a terrible lecturer, and he knew his student evaluations were terrible every time. As he handed out the evaluations he would tell us that he did not read them, and did not care what we wrote. I graduated twenty years ago, but just checked the department's website. He's still employed!
- lazyjeff 7y ago
  Fair enough, but even the tenured professors were untenured at some point before so they did matter and were not problematic enough to deny tenure. And tenure doesn't really apply the same for adjuncts or some lecturers, who are perhaps even more dependent on student evals. And of course it depends on the seriousness the university takes teaching, as there are R1s that are more research oriented and care less about teaching, but they account for 1% of all universities.
  - virtuous_signal 7y ago
    Even as a grad student, my teaching evaluations couldn't negatively affect me. The only people it could have real, negative consequences for were instructors, who work on contracts. As an example, my department head (perhaps unintentionally) sent everyone an email saying any scores of less than 3.73 on a 1-7 scale were grounds for termination of that instructor's contract. I did not envy them at all, basically being highly educated customer service workers.
hogFeast 7y ago
Every large-scale student evaluation I have ever seen has been massively uninformative because students on different courses usually have drastically different expectations. At my university, the law school was top-notch (at least, it is the best in the country) and it got the lowest score by far every year. Why? High expectations, huge number of students competing hard. The best school? Theology. Why? Low expectations, not many students in a far less competitive environment (And I studied in both and in probably four or five faculties across the school...Law was the best, Theology the worst...not even close, the former had people from Law firms, you got full feedback on everything...the latter, you usually got no feedback on any work). This is really the point...now, you can do some kind of grouped mean model or you can compare over time...but what is the actual point? The reason they do this (or did this at my uni) was to compare departments/courses...but everyone knew it was bullshit...people lost jobs (I actually met the Dean who masterminded this, he came from the private sector, taught a minor course in the business school, and was utterly clueless).
analog31 7y ago
Conventional wisdom is that student course evaluations are primarily driven by the grades that students expect to receive. There is strong pressure to give out easy grades. I overheard two professors who were teaching different sections of the same course, get into a shouting match over grades. One of them was up for tenure, and wanted to give easy grades. He was quite explicit about this.
jacques_chester 7y ago
Course evaluations have no meaningful relationship to actual learning: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191491X16300323 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01914... The usual argument that has been given in favour of evaluations is to show a correlation with final exam scores. The two problems being (1) small samples and (2) soft-ball exams leading to higher evaluation scores. Humans are not able to accurately evaluate their own learning. When we experience fluency or are entertained, we substitute those attributes for the attribute of ability to recognise or recall information.

vraivroo 7y ago

Yes, you've described why large corporations are hated. It's quite obvious that a handful of numbers are incapable of measuring a person's true impact, yet by god, they insist on trying.

WalterBright 7y ago
To be fair, metrics are often insisted upon by unions in order to not allow people to be fired based on the company's feelings about them. They're also insisted upon by courts to adjudicate wrongful termination cases as well as discrimination cases.
tcbawo 7y ago
All businesses want good employees, but what they want most are employees that can be replaced if necessary. They hire people to accomplish tasks and add value. I have felt underappreciated in corporate roles before, but then I realized that I was attaching too much of my identity to my job and in something where I had no real equity. Since then, I am much better at separating work from personal life, and I am happier putting my personal interests above the company's.
- VRay 7y ago
  Yeah, I was a lot less upset about some of the crappy experiences I'd had working for evil giant companies after I read "The E-Myth Revisited". My elite 10 person team was doing a great job on Device A, while Device B had a team of 200 semi-skilled foreign contractors just barely keeping things on track. Then, somehow, the company decided to reorg my super-skilled team and promoted the leader of the contractor team. From 3-4 levels up in the company, the Device A team and the Device B team were IDENTICAL. They were both delivering things on time and under budget, even though team A was costing the company 1/5th as much, they were both fine. These products were generating hundreds of millions of dollars or maybe even billions in revenue per year, so the difference $5 million/year and $25 million was irrelevant. If I'd realized this sooner, I wouldn't have put so much effort into doing a great job at the expense of my own interests, and it would've been just fine
7y ago

hhs 7y ago

> I get that its immeasurably frustrating for a person to be distilled into performance metrics, but how else can we measure one's impact? I think it may also be useful to talk about the reliability and validity of all the things that are measured. Also, how useful is this stuff among the different fields? The article talks about gig workers and manufacturers. Would be interesting if these metrics were applied rigorously to other fields like politicians, talk show pundits, and forecasters.

mjfl 7y ago
This was the basic premise behind the book "Expert political judgement" by Phil Tetlock.
- hhs 7y ago
  Thanks for the reference.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    It's an outstanding read. His followup Superforecasters was co-authored with a journalist for a more popular audience, but still fascinating.
onceUponADime 7y ago
No, no, this rigorious ratings are for lower class endavours. Higher classes get a title, which is a one off rubber stamp of quality and then will never again be judged on performance standing alone. Dr. Senior. Dipl. Ing. Except by there peers, who will lower a silk of omerta over "internal" affairs like a lack of quality in work. Of course, between these professions, there are meta-power struggles, which will play out, in a court- stylized fashion, a eternal ritualized war between castes like "management" and "technical execution". Metrics, as demanded by one caste, are worthless, as they rely on a working interface provided by the oppossition or in depth knowledge, making a allegiance two too factions necessary. Thus all that remains of them is a ritualized insistence, to compensate for the creeping feeling of a lack of controll. For those who need them, can not get them and be certain they are accurate. Making metrics, actually - a flag of truce.

ceejayoz 7y ago

> how else can we measure one's impact? This is a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism. We must do something This is something Therefore, we must do this.

jschwartzi 7y ago
Not to be confused with "Do something, even if it's wrong" which is how you break out of analysis paralysis.
dredmorbius 7y ago
A fave. See also: Don't just do something, stand there! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/22/stand-there/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/22/stand-there/

grawprog 7y ago

>A large enough corporation is a machine A machine in which the parts of are made up of humans with 'feelings'. Distilling human beings down to cogs in a machine is bad enough when it comes from executives. This belief that corporations are some kind of non-human machine like entity is part of why the world's so fucked today. Maybe the world would be a better place if corporations weren't run as inhuman machines with no care or regard to their employees or the world in which they operate.

jiggliemon 7y ago
> This belief that corporations are some kind of non-human machine like entity is part of why the world's so fucked today. What point in history are you arguing was less fucked than it is today?
- lstamour 7y ago
  Before corporations were people, in the US at least? http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history-corporations-us/ http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history... Not at all going to claim it as ideal, but it's a starting point for considering other possible alternatives to today's giant, faceless corporations where nobody within the corporation is easily held accountable, etc.

3pt14159 7y ago

I think the core problem is having one universal metric. Take Uber or Lyft as an example. Some people like silence, some like conversation, some like music. If the ML models were better or if it were based on a web of trust we wouldn't need to have a score that treats a 4.5 as universally better than a 4.6 or similar.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

hogFeast 7y ago

You should have more than one supervisor (and solicit information from peers). But basically...yes...using judgement, learning how to assess skills...that is all part of management. You cannot turn a bad manager into a good one with information. I have seen no evidence that "hard numbers" work (they aren't "hard"...there is usually almost no justification for a particular metric). And it feeds on innumerable human biases (inability to confront uncertainty, using "hard" information to justify an emotional conclusion, creating meaningless targets, etc.). In my experience, the practical issue is two-fold: one, people are just going to do what they do anyway but they ignore warnings signs/are more unflexible and two, you optimise for data that is obvious, collectable, and (usually) completely irrelevant. This is a trend, it will pass as all these trends do. It started off as quite a good idea (businesses were often failing to set targets or quantify success/failure) and has just got totally out of control.

moksly 7y ago

I work in the public sector where the pendulum is always swinging between trust and control. It's partly because we're not entirely driven by MBA's and our success criteria isn't earning shareholders value, but it's mainly because we've been around for so long because we can't go bankrupt when we fail. There are advantages and disadvantage to both approaches. In a system of trust the key benefits are better products, happier employees who have less sick days and stick around longer, more creativity and new solutions that are appreciated by the community. The downside is that some employees, managers or contractors are going to take advantage of the trust in such a terrible way that you'll have no option but to swing towards control once the media finds out. A good example from my country is a decade back, when we had a lot of trust in our public sector and an elderly care facility was saving money by putting dirty diapers back on the elderly if the urine in the diapers didn't weigh enough. Crazy, right? But that's the stuff that happens with trust, you'll also see managers contracting out procurement contracts to companies they own themselves and other stuff like that. On the opposite side you have the MBA based approach where everything is streamlined, measured and conformed. This is where you can build two hospitals for the price of 1,2 because the plan for them are exactly the same. It's where you LEAN every single business process up, and harvest the benefits. It's efficient, clean, and it slowly exhumes your business of value. Because the MBA approach very rarely manages to create something new, it's just really great at maximizing your current system. Eventually a neighboring city is going to do something wild, like figure out how to completely wipe out dyslexia by trying some crazy new method, because they trusted some hippie teacher with a plan. This is where you're forced to swing back toward trust and value tradeskills (not sure if this is the right word in English) because your politicians can't survive another period of having the highest dyslexia numbers in the country and nothing in the MBA playbook can help them. This is a little simplified of course, and I'm certain things are different in the private sector, but I dare say, that if your organisation sticks around for long enough, it's bound to see the pendulum swing between those two outlines.

JamesBarney 7y ago
I think the bigger issue with the MBA approach is it's always possible to trade a little bit of long term hard to measure value for short term profits.

taurath 7y ago

Hard numbers have been winning, and thats been the problem. Any time you have a set of numbers to describe a thing, you're creating an imperfect model of that thing. When you only consider that imperfect model, the things moves in the direction of fulfilling that model. You can't say you care about employee well-being, unless you have a metric, or several metrics, it won't ever be done.

Consultant32452 7y ago

I'm a bit on the spectrum and I absolutely love having my performance distilled down to a set of metrics. It clearly communicates to me which types of actions are valued in a way that I will often miss from normal social interactions due to my blindness to social queues. The way I perceive work is very helpful in this regard. To me, the purpose of work is to maximize my income/lifestyle while not dipping below a lower bound threshold of misery. I don't seek personal or emotional fulfillment from work at all. I did that when I was younger and, for me, it was a bad way to approach life. This way I'm much happier and my focus/attention is more on the kinds of things I hope will wind up in my obit: family, relationships, charity, etc. I wonder if sales people ever write articles about how they're at the "mercy" of their sales metrics. The idea of it seems hilarious.

VRay 7y ago
It's all well and good until you get judged by a bunch of completely borked-up, unfair metrics. The computer sets you to running halfway across a gigantic warehouse again and again, then measures your "picks per hour" vs somebody who consistently ends up in a tiny corner of the warehouse. Your manager agrees that it's not a problem and tells you not to worry, then a few months down the line some algorithm decides to give your lucky coworker a big raise and you don't get a boost at all. Thankfully I haven't had to deal with any metrics like this for more than a couple of months at a time.. Since engineers' specialty is to optimize ratings, it's an obvious-enough waste of time to apply them that they're usually short-lived.

CKN23-ARIN 7y ago

> how else can we measure one's impact? Goodhart's law suggests that this is impossible.

closeparen 7y ago

Yet people who passed laboratory science classes in college, people who should really know better, choose to govern by the metrics they "feel" are causally related to outcomes. Maybe you really do have a formula that outperforms a panel of subject matter experts. It does happen sometimes. Not for long, because the experts start using it. But the bar for making this kind of claim is, at minimum, peer-reviewed experimental results that reproduce. Human experience is a rich dataset. Intuition is a sophisticated machine. It blows my mind that people will so easily dismiss all of that in favor of a few bits of information and some 3rd grade arithmetic they just made up. It's not scientifically rigorous just because there's a table and a graph. Come on!