The problems with (personal) goals is that it's really hard to both define good goals and measure them. And if you don't you make things worse for good people.

The problems with (personal) goals is that it's really hard to both define good goals and measure them. And if you don't you make things worse for good people. Example: the goal for someone is to build feature X. Now, they could tremendously help the company by answering the questions of another developer for feature Y, but that makes them look worse when it comes to evaluation of their goal because it's less time they can spend on it. Now, you can also set a second goal of "be helpful" or so, but how do you measure that? And so on. In the end, goals might be good to get a better performance out of unmotivated/lazy folks, but for motivated/engaged folks, it's the opposite of being helpful.