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The article dances around a topic that is very relevant across technology companies- toxic metrics. I worked for many years at a company that prides itself on
by efitz 4y ago
The article dances around a topic that is very relevant across technology companies- toxic metrics.
I worked for many years at a company that prides itself on being metrics driven. To the point that they celebrated having many significant figures after the decimal point when measuring length of negative events in seconds.
The good side of metrics driven culture is that having a metric gives you a concrete goal.
The downside is that really good metrics are often very hard. By really good, I mean metrics that measure the desired outcome.
It’s much easier to measure, for example, how many operation X your service performed, rather than the value the service delivered to your business or your customers. So we assume that each operation X contributes a uniform, positive quantum to those outcomes and we count X’s.
- hinkley 4y agoToxic metrics are a subset of perverse incentives. Necessary, but not sufficient to stay out of trouble.
- godelski 4y agoI don't think they dance around the topic so much as outright state that it is bad. They mostly talk about engagement because it is the primary metric but even state that we should not value what we measure but measure what we value. Which it is harder to do that, but hey, you got billions of dollars to work with, it seems like the resources are there.
- JohnFen 4y agoThe software industry has made me very aware that being metric-driven can be a terrible thing as easily as a good thing. Software has been getting substantially worse over time (in my opinion) in large part because of the use of metrics.
- FalconSensei 4y agoGoodhart's law basically also. I've seen ppl on Twitter posting 'unpopular opinions' that they don't even agree, just to get replies. And then admit on the conversation that they don't agree with that.