4 ms·

I've been through several jobs that used OKRs, and even had to read a book on it at one point, and to be completely honest I still have no idea what they are. M

by nkrisc 4y ago

I've been through several jobs that used OKRs, and even had to read a book on it at one point, and to be completely honest I still have no idea what they are. Maybe I'm just dumb or can't grasp it, but while I know what all the words mean, I still don't understand what it is or why it's useful. I'd write some "OKRs" based on what my boss told me to write, who was told be their boss, and then I'd enter them into some HR system and never saw or heard from them again. It was all very cargo cult-y. I never really understood how an OKR is at all applicable to an individual. Maybe our OKRs were bad but they were always related to increasing some metric or measure. I can't personally, directly affect any of that. I can do my damnedest to do good work that I think will help with that, but ultimately I have no control over whether our conversion rate goes down because some other department did something that hurt it. Yeah we did a great job on some landing page but then marketing pushed the wrong audience to it so it tanks. How does an OKR help with that? Now it looks like I haven't met any of my goals? Maybe the problem was we always had these executive-level, vague "objectives" set by the C-suite, but then nobody knew what to actually do with that. Object: be an industry leader in innovation. What does that even mean?

djur 4y ago
> then I'd enter them into some HR system and never saw or heard from them again My favorite version of this is when it's personal goals attached to some kind of performance review framework, but the company keeps on changing its performance review system every 6 months so you literally never can see them again.
- the_af 4y ago
  > the company keeps on changing its performance review system every 6 months so you literally never can see them again. Yes! In my past two jobs I finally learned to never pay attention to official performance reviews and career goal plans and personal goals tracking systems: every 6 months to 1 year, like clockwork, someone important in HR gets replaced, a new tool to track goals gets bought, and everything is redesigned from scratch. The only way to get a promotion or a pay rise is to push for it on a completely different band, nothing to do with these systems.
BlargMcLarg 4y ago
It's another corporate flavor of the "month" trying to solve a realistic problem developed by corporates themselves, in Corporatese. In theory the idea of OKRs is fine. They are "supposed" to give individuals a form of autonomous growth which can be related to the company and has a way to be measured and traced back. It gives them the "personal responsibility", "growth" and "autonomy" which tickles a particular type of people. In practice, there are too many conflicting viewpoints, agendas, power hierarchies, goals and more, to make them work out. That's assuming everyone works in good faith with one another, too. As others point out, nothing's keeping a manager from using OKRs against you. Stay tuned when in 10-20 years it will silently die off to be replaced by another flavor, and reinvent the square wheel once more.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  > In theory the idea of OKRs is fine. They are "supposed" to give individuals a form of autonomous growth which can be related to the company and has a way to be measured and traced back. It gives them the "personal responsibility", "growth" and "autonomy" which tickles a particular type of people. I still don’t even understand how that’s supposed to work unless you’re an executive with wide latitude to do what you think is best. I worked on what my manager told me to work on. All I can control is the quality of my own work. Maybe it wasn’t meant for the rank and file.
crispyambulance 4y ago
They're meaningless. I don't understand how these things can continue to exist and evolve in ever more ridiculous incarnations of the same stuff. If, next year, they all disappeared and managers just "cut the pie" for their own sub-org-- nothing bad would happen and the vast majority of folks would see it as a relief. The weird thing is that almost everyone, even high up in the organization, thinks these performance eval mechanisms are a baloney waste of time. But somewhere, at some level, somebody is really pushing hard for these and values them. Is it a suit thing? At what point in one's career does someone all of sudden decide "yeah, having everyone write paragraphs of BS justifying their work performance is a good use of time and THAT will REALLY solve problems"?
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > At what point in one's career does someone all of sudden decide "yeah, having everyone write paragraphs of BS justifying their work performance is a good use of time and THAT will REALLY solve problems"? When somebody starts making a lot of noise that people should do it, the people under you seem to unanimously support it, and the people above you seem to unanimously support it. That is, except for the very few that you can get a honest answer from, those are the only few that think it's bullshit, but put-up with it because everybody else is pushing it. A better question is how the hell somebody getting money to teach your people and organize the process get enough credibility that they can mess with all the communication channels. Maybe an even better question is if there is any way to make people feel safer at work than in a crazy absolutist king's court, so that they have less need to lie.
- lovich 4y ago
  Our corporate environments and capitalist structure in the US consolidate power in people. Once you start being an exec who can fire individuals on a whim or hand out raises/promotions they end up getting surrounded by yes men and then you start seeing the crazy ideas start flowing down. The worse corporate jobs I’ve had have been the privately held large firms as the places are big enough you never know the executive but you still end up spending days/weeks doing ice breakers and personality assessments because the CEO’s life guru convinced him it would align the astrological feng shui. It doesn’t do anything for the company but waste time and money, but until it wastes enough to cause the leaders to lose all power it’ll continue flowing down to us peons
nairteashop 4y ago
I think of "OKRs" as just a fancy name for two things: (1) What are you going to do in the next quarter/year/etc? i.e. what are you & your team's "objectives" (2) How are you going to achieve that? i.e. what are the "key results" you're going to hit to achieve your objective. I hope most people will agree that, in an organization, having an understanding - and agreement - of what each team plans to work on, along with the trust that they have reasonably well-thought steps on how to achieve that objective, is incredibly helpful. The problem is, as with "Agile", "TDD", etc, people will run with this and lose track of what the actual end-goal is, i.e. to build things that matter while ensuring coordination between teams. So, you will see things that don't make much sense, like OKRs for individual contributors, OKRs that change monthly, objectives that aren't necessarily right for the company, key results that don't really tie into the objective, etc. I'm not sure what the solution is. At a previous gig, I tried asking management plainly to state publicly what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, and no one did it. Then I tried, let's do OKRs "just like Google" and everyone jumped on, even though IMO it's the same thing...
xtracto 4y ago
I was head of Engineering at exec level in different startups that grew past series B and started implementing OKRs... they never made sense to me fir the tech side. I could see sales, marketing and customer success OKRs that were aligned with their day to day tasks. But for Engineering? I had all kind of nice reading OKRs: reduce mttr, mttf, reduce bugs, reduce feature implementation time, etc. But in reality the day-to-day work of Engineering was "build the shit that the product team defines", we had little influence in stories that went on each sprint, and invariably every time we pushed for some technical matter, business always trumped us and the stories went to the backlog.
- nkrisc 4y ago
  This is basically what I saw. All the objectives in engineering and product orgs basically boiled down to “do you job more gooder.”
- andrekandre 4y ago
  > But in reality the day-to-day work of Engineering was "build the shit that the product team defines", we had little influence in stories that went on each sprint, and invariably every time we pushed for some technical matter, business always trumped us and the stories went to the backlog. in the end i think this is basically the unstated goal... no one can say it out loud because its a bad look, so they use an intermediary (some framework like okrs, or scrum etc) to attain that "business trumps engineering" culture...

by nkrisc 4y ago

djur 4y ago

> then I'd enter them into some HR system and never saw or heard from them again My favorite version of this is when it's personal goals attached to some kind of performance review framework, but the company keeps on changing its performance review system every 6 months so you literally never can see them again.

the_af 4y ago
> the company keeps on changing its performance review system every 6 months so you literally never can see them again. Yes! In my past two jobs I finally learned to never pay attention to official performance reviews and career goal plans and personal goals tracking systems: every 6 months to 1 year, like clockwork, someone important in HR gets replaced, a new tool to track goals gets bought, and everything is redesigned from scratch. The only way to get a promotion or a pay rise is to push for it on a completely different band, nothing to do with these systems.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

It's another corporate flavor of the "month" trying to solve a realistic problem developed by corporates themselves, in Corporatese. In theory the idea of OKRs is fine. They are "supposed" to give individuals a form of autonomous growth which can be related to the company and has a way to be measured and traced back. It gives them the "personal responsibility", "growth" and "autonomy" which tickles a particular type of people. In practice, there are too many conflicting viewpoints, agendas, power hierarchies, goals and more, to make them work out. That's assuming everyone works in good faith with one another, too. As others point out, nothing's keeping a manager from using OKRs against you. Stay tuned when in 10-20 years it will silently die off to be replaced by another flavor, and reinvent the square wheel once more.

nkrisc 4y ago
> In theory the idea of OKRs is fine. They are "supposed" to give individuals a form of autonomous growth which can be related to the company and has a way to be measured and traced back. It gives them the "personal responsibility", "growth" and "autonomy" which tickles a particular type of people. I still don’t even understand how that’s supposed to work unless you’re an executive with wide latitude to do what you think is best. I worked on what my manager told me to work on. All I can control is the quality of my own work. Maybe it wasn’t meant for the rank and file.

crispyambulance 4y ago

They're meaningless. I don't understand how these things can continue to exist and evolve in ever more ridiculous incarnations of the same stuff. If, next year, they all disappeared and managers just "cut the pie" for their own sub-org-- nothing bad would happen and the vast majority of folks would see it as a relief. The weird thing is that almost everyone, even high up in the organization, thinks these performance eval mechanisms are a baloney waste of time. But somewhere, at some level, somebody is really pushing hard for these and values them. Is it a suit thing? At what point in one's career does someone all of sudden decide "yeah, having everyone write paragraphs of BS justifying their work performance is a good use of time and THAT will REALLY solve problems"?

marcosdumay 4y ago
> At what point in one's career does someone all of sudden decide "yeah, having everyone write paragraphs of BS justifying their work performance is a good use of time and THAT will REALLY solve problems"? When somebody starts making a lot of noise that people should do it, the people under you seem to unanimously support it, and the people above you seem to unanimously support it. That is, except for the very few that you can get a honest answer from, those are the only few that think it's bullshit, but put-up with it because everybody else is pushing it. A better question is how the hell somebody getting money to teach your people and organize the process get enough credibility that they can mess with all the communication channels. Maybe an even better question is if there is any way to make people feel safer at work than in a crazy absolutist king's court, so that they have less need to lie.
lovich 4y ago
Our corporate environments and capitalist structure in the US consolidate power in people. Once you start being an exec who can fire individuals on a whim or hand out raises/promotions they end up getting surrounded by yes men and then you start seeing the crazy ideas start flowing down. The worse corporate jobs I’ve had have been the privately held large firms as the places are big enough you never know the executive but you still end up spending days/weeks doing ice breakers and personality assessments because the CEO’s life guru convinced him it would align the astrological feng shui. It doesn’t do anything for the company but waste time and money, but until it wastes enough to cause the leaders to lose all power it’ll continue flowing down to us peons

nairteashop 4y ago

I think of "OKRs" as just a fancy name for two things: (1) What are you going to do in the next quarter/year/etc? i.e. what are you & your team's "objectives" (2) How are you going to achieve that? i.e. what are the "key results" you're going to hit to achieve your objective. I hope most people will agree that, in an organization, having an understanding - and agreement - of what each team plans to work on, along with the trust that they have reasonably well-thought steps on how to achieve that objective, is incredibly helpful. The problem is, as with "Agile", "TDD", etc, people will run with this and lose track of what the actual end-goal is, i.e. to build things that matter while ensuring coordination between teams. So, you will see things that don't make much sense, like OKRs for individual contributors, OKRs that change monthly, objectives that aren't necessarily right for the company, key results that don't really tie into the objective, etc. I'm not sure what the solution is. At a previous gig, I tried asking management plainly to state publicly what they're going to do and how they're going to do it, and no one did it. Then I tried, let's do OKRs "just like Google" and everyone jumped on, even though IMO it's the same thing...

xtracto 4y ago

I was head of Engineering at exec level in different startups that grew past series B and started implementing OKRs... they never made sense to me fir the tech side. I could see sales, marketing and customer success OKRs that were aligned with their day to day tasks. But for Engineering? I had all kind of nice reading OKRs: reduce mttr, mttf, reduce bugs, reduce feature implementation time, etc. But in reality the day-to-day work of Engineering was "build the shit that the product team defines", we had little influence in stories that went on each sprint, and invariably every time we pushed for some technical matter, business always trumped us and the stories went to the backlog.

nkrisc 4y ago
This is basically what I saw. All the objectives in engineering and product orgs basically boiled down to “do you job more gooder.”
andrekandre 4y ago
> But in reality the day-to-day work of Engineering was "build the shit that the product team defines", we had little influence in stories that went on each sprint, and invariably every time we pushed for some technical matter, business always trumped us and the stories went to the backlog. in the end i think this is basically the unstated goal... no one can say it out loud because its a bad look, so they use an intermediary (some framework like okrs, or scrum etc) to attain that "business trumps engineering" culture...