Actually, they seem to be presupposing that you're using these metrics as a target to judge employee performance by (in the style of key productivity indicators

Actually, they seem to be presupposing that you're using these metrics as a target to judge employee performance by (in the style of key productivity indicators), rather than as a diagnosic tool to debug your/management's own mistakes/potential improvements in how the team is organized, and then pointing out in what way the former approach - which always fails regardless of which metrics you use due to Goodhart's law - fails with this particular choice of metrics. Edit: granted, sometimes the result of said debugging is that it really is a hardware problem, and with how unstandardized people are, that's actually common enough that you'll likely run into it. But you don't fix (for example) a disk drive that reports writes as complete before they're peristed by stack-ranking drives and trying to pick the ones that lose data less; you fix it either by replacing the faulty drive immediately (assuming you can get working drives), or (more relevantly to dealing with people) by working around it in software. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law