4 ms·

Microsoft tried this years ago under Balmer and they called it Stack Ranking. They stopped doing it when it destroyed morale and they created terrible products

Microsoft tried this years ago under Balmer and they called it Stack Ranking. They stopped doing it when it destroyed morale and they created terrible products like Vista and Zune. Just no. Read team books and do not create dog eat dog environments, we are not sales. We are knowledge workers.

DarylZero 5y ago
Gamification doesn't have to be ranking. You can gamify individuals improving their own metrics. Like github showing you your contribution "streak" (number of days in a row with a commit). Software development lacks good metrics, though.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  > You can gamify individuals improving their own metrics. Here's how that goes. "Daryl we have deadlines and we need you to make sure these tickets get completed!" You burn the midnight oil and then a month later: "Daryl, your productivity metrics are lower than last month, why aren't you a team player?" It's a trap.
  - jstx1 5y ago
    It also creates bad incentives - "oh I need to commit every day? let me spread out today's work over the whole week so I can get a green mark for every day instead of shipping this feature that's ready" Goodhart's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) gets repeated a lot in threads like these but it's for a good reason.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    If you want to constantly increase output it's obviously impossible. That is just bad gamification. I think gamification has to be progress toward completion, and the difficulty of completion has to be set deliberately so it isn't either easy or daunting. So every 1000 tickets you get a day PTO. More like that. Tickets aren't good metrics, it means prioritizing easy tickets and incentivizing creating more tickets than necessary. There are no good metrics for software work really.
  - amriksohata 5y ago
    yup

DarylZero 5y ago

Gamification doesn't have to be ranking. You can gamify individuals improving their own metrics. Like github showing you your contribution "streak" (number of days in a row with a commit). Software development lacks good metrics, though.

willcipriano 5y ago
> You can gamify individuals improving their own metrics. Here's how that goes. "Daryl we have deadlines and we need you to make sure these tickets get completed!" You burn the midnight oil and then a month later: "Daryl, your productivity metrics are lower than last month, why aren't you a team player?" It's a trap.
- jstx1 5y ago
  It also creates bad incentives - "oh I need to commit every day? let me spread out today's work over the whole week so I can get a green mark for every day instead of shipping this feature that's ready" Goodhart's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) gets repeated a lot in threads like these but it's for a good reason.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- DarylZero 5y ago
  If you want to constantly increase output it's obviously impossible. That is just bad gamification. I think gamification has to be progress toward completion, and the difficulty of completion has to be set deliberately so it isn't either easy or daunting. So every 1000 tickets you get a day PTO. More like that. Tickets aren't good metrics, it means prioritizing easy tickets and incentivizing creating more tickets than necessary. There are no good metrics for software work really.
- amriksohata 5y ago
  yup