Eh I saw worse than that. The last team I was on at Google before I left had metrics that for years genuinely got better, and these were real metrics users care

Eh I saw worse than that. The last team I was on at Google before I left had metrics that for years genuinely got better, and these were real metrics users cared about, they weren't gamed or irrelevant (related to spam detection). Each quarter our manager would go to his managers and present the team's latest success. He'd show the metrics and say how they'd improved from last time. Praise would come down from on high. As time went by this little ritual become almost formalized, because said manager kept re-using the same presentation slides each time, just adjusting the numbers. And the praise was always the same. Morale was good. One day, the metrics stopped going up. In fact they went down a bit. What happened? The manager went to his manager and gave the exact same presentation, in which somehow the metrics were still great news and the team was still executing really well. And his managers didn't notice. The praise came back, just the same as it always did. At that point me and one or two others on the team became very cynical and lost motivation, because we realized that nobody who influenced our careers seemed to have noticed what was really happening. Celebrating an endless series of utopian success stories, regardless of truth, was more important than tackling reality.