> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. It gets people (in your example, designers, but the

> Just make a decent UI and stick to it. I don't understand why there are redesigns over and over and over. It gets people (in your example, designers, but the same organizational disease affects engineers and product managers too) promoted. Perhaps somebody got promoted this cycle for "making a decent UI", but you're not gonna get promoted next cycle for "sticking to it". And managers get promoted by "growing" teams to build stuff. When performance and promotion criteria incentivize "having impact", which is understood to mean "launching stuff", this is what results. It's a analog of "teaching to the test" [0], or a special case of "gaming the metrics" [1] or "you are what you measure" [2]. I don't know if there's a term for the general phenomenon. I agree it sucks, but while I'm invoking cliches, I should remind myself: don't hate the player(s), hate the game. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_to_the_test [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-metrics [2] https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure https://hbr.org/2010/06/column-you-are-what-you-measure