5 ms·

Could someone ELI5 to me what KPI even stands for? Does that mean like they're like the shock troopers of open source?

by jart 5y ago

neilalexander 5y ago
Key Performance Indicator.
martincmartin 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator Engineer's performance is measured, in part, by number of kernel commits. So, the number of kernel commits is a key performance indicator for the developer.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
KPI = Key Performance Indicator = "thing we decided is important for us to measure and increase" As such exactly what it is, will depend on company/industry/market/team/project/etc. It may be revenue or units sold or widgets made or turnover or customer satisfaction or days without accident etc. In principle, it communicates to teams what is important to business and helps everybody focus and sync.... with usual real-world caveats and implementation risks. I imagine here, for a large-company linux team, a "KPI" was "how many commits you made" - they measure it, they track it, and reward/recognize/punish team members based on it. So people start working toward increasing the KPI in any feasible way - if you only want me to increase the KPI of commits done, OK, fine, I'll do some commits.
- falcor84 5y ago
  >thing we decided is important for us to measure and increase This is a great explanation, and I just wanted to nitpick that for some KPI's (e.g. percentage of defective components, or latency), you would aim to "decrease" the KPI, and in some rare instances, you'd want to keep the KPI within a range (e.g. resource utilization, or inventory size, when you want a predefined amount of buffer).
alxlaz 5y ago
KPI = Key Performance Indicator. It's basically a list of things that are considered during your evaluation. The more items off that check list you cross (if they're one-time items, like "ensure an uptime of X"), or the more of each you do (if they're things like "upstream patches" or "patents granted"), the better your score is. It's a shit system that does exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do IMHO, but that kind of stuff doesn't belong in an ELI5 explanation :-D.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  KPIs are not a shit system, they are actually important to running any nontrivial organization. The issue isn't whether KPIs are good or bad but what you do with them. KPIs don't need to be tied to actual people, usually they are tied to teams, systems, projects, processes, etc. For example, a number of users resigning from our services might be a KPI. KPIs are an important tool to understand what is going on and whether we are going in the desired direction or not and to communicate this to your teams. KPIs are a tool for telling your organization what you think is important, to set the incentives in the right direction. KPIs will not help you if you have no effing idea how to set incentives -- they are just a tool in case you know what you are doing. Because they are just one step from being a target for your teams, you need to be very careful to communicate what you mean exactly when you set KPIs. Now, if you make number of users resigning from your services a KPI, you immediately need to set some additional guarantees that this is not overused -- for example by making it difficult for your clients to resign. This might be another KPI (user satisfaction with regards to how easy it was for them to resign).
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Humans are extremely good at gaming KPIs, and will do so as long as they're rewarded for it.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      Overuse law. If you overuse a law too much it stops being meaningful. Organizations have hard time improving without measuring their performance and communicating incentives. There isn't magical solution you can scribe on a paper and tell everybody -- this is exactly what you need to do to achieve success. The best what you can do is compromise, it is unavoidable. So we know setting targets can make wrong incentives. It is also not a reason to not be setting targets. It is a reason to make sure you damn set those incentives right and take close look that you are getting what you have intended.
NAR8789 5y ago
TIL what ELI5 means
sudhirj 5y ago
Oh god no. It means their managers evaluate them on that metric. In this case, the company has set targets on how many Linux kernel patches employees should land.

Could someone ELI5 to me what KPI even stands for? Does that mean like they're like the shock troopers of open source?

by jart 5y ago

Could someone ELI5 to me what KPI even stands for? Does that mean like they're like the shock troopers of open source?

neilalexander 5y ago

Key Performance Indicator.

martincmartin 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator Engineer's performance is measured, in part, by number of kernel commits. So, the number of kernel commits is a key performance indicator for the developer.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

KPI = Key Performance Indicator = "thing we decided is important for us to measure and increase" As such exactly what it is, will depend on company/industry/market/team/project/etc. It may be revenue or units sold or widgets made or turnover or customer satisfaction or days without accident etc. In principle, it communicates to teams what is important to business and helps everybody focus and sync.... with usual real-world caveats and implementation risks. I imagine here, for a large-company linux team, a "KPI" was "how many commits you made" - they measure it, they track it, and reward/recognize/punish team members based on it. So people start working toward increasing the KPI in any feasible way - if you only want me to increase the KPI of commits done, OK, fine, I'll do some commits.

falcor84 5y ago
>thing we decided is important for us to measure and increase This is a great explanation, and I just wanted to nitpick that for some KPI's (e.g. percentage of defective components, or latency), you would aim to "decrease" the KPI, and in some rare instances, you'd want to keep the KPI within a range (e.g. resource utilization, or inventory size, when you want a predefined amount of buffer).

alxlaz 5y ago

KPI = Key Performance Indicator. It's basically a list of things that are considered during your evaluation. The more items off that check list you cross (if they're one-time items, like "ensure an uptime of X"), or the more of each you do (if they're things like "upstream patches" or "patents granted"), the better your score is. It's a shit system that does exactly the opposite of what it's supposed to do IMHO, but that kind of stuff doesn't belong in an ELI5 explanation :-D.

lmilcin 5y ago
KPIs are not a shit system, they are actually important to running any nontrivial organization. The issue isn't whether KPIs are good or bad but what you do with them. KPIs don't need to be tied to actual people, usually they are tied to teams, systems, projects, processes, etc. For example, a number of users resigning from our services might be a KPI. KPIs are an important tool to understand what is going on and whether we are going in the desired direction or not and to communicate this to your teams. KPIs are a tool for telling your organization what you think is important, to set the incentives in the right direction. KPIs will not help you if you have no effing idea how to set incentives -- they are just a tool in case you know what you are doing. Because they are just one step from being a target for your teams, you need to be very careful to communicate what you mean exactly when you set KPIs. Now, if you make number of users resigning from your services a KPI, you immediately need to set some additional guarantees that this is not overused -- for example by making it difficult for your clients to resign. This might be another KPI (user satisfaction with regards to how easy it was for them to resign).
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Humans are extremely good at gaming KPIs, and will do so as long as they're rewarded for it.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    Overuse law. If you overuse a law too much it stops being meaningful. Organizations have hard time improving without measuring their performance and communicating incentives. There isn't magical solution you can scribe on a paper and tell everybody -- this is exactly what you need to do to achieve success. The best what you can do is compromise, it is unavoidable. So we know setting targets can make wrong incentives. It is also not a reason to not be setting targets. It is a reason to make sure you damn set those incentives right and take close look that you are getting what you have intended.

NAR8789 5y ago

TIL what ELI5 means

sudhirj 5y ago

Oh god no. It means their managers evaluate them on that metric. In this case, the company has set targets on how many Linux kernel patches employees should land.