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> Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold. Unfortunately, this often leads to corporate shortsightedness (e.g. "Th
by kstenerud 4y ago
> Unless, of course, the measure was good to begin with - such as cash or bars of gold.
Unfortunately, this often leads to corporate shortsightedness (e.g. "This will destroy our customer goodwill and eliminate our competitiveness in the coming decade, but it will make our quarterly revenue targets and our jobs depend on that, so we're doing it.")
- osigurdson 4y agoI did say "net present value" - cash or bars of gold which represent the NPV of a pull request/patch.
- kstenerud 4y agoWhich, once again introduces a perverse incentive to produce a high local value contribution that hurts the long term good, over a lower present value contribution that promotes a better long term result. Any metric you set for comparing contributions, no matter how good you think it is, WILL produce a cobra effect. This is because metrics are a model, which by definition can't capture the entirety of reality, and so any attempt to enforce based on that model is doomed to failure. How much would you value a maintenance task? Or a process change? A better air conditioning system? Game night to let off steam and improve morale? How do you calculate what its long term worth is from the productivity change in order to assign a present value to that contributor? How can you even know what kind of an effect it will have long term? You'd need a pretty damn sophisticated model, and even then it would still only be a model, missing many points of the reality hurtling towards you at the speed of light. And meanwhile, the little things that improve long term prospects simply aren't done, because the metric doesn't value them. Thus, metrics, even NPV, cash, bars of gold, are bad policy enforcement vehicles.
- osigurdson 4y agoNo, because the NPV includes all cash flows (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value). I completely agree with you that it is probably impossible to compute (per my original comment). But at least understanding what the target is helps imo.
- kstenerud 4y agoUsing metrics to gauge how well the enterprise is doing on the whole and to influence policy decisions and strategy is absolutely good and desirable. It's only when metrics become rules or quotas or measures to compare people or departments as a policy that things go bad.
- osigurdson 4y agoUsing good metrics is good, using dumb metrics is dumb. Most metrics are probably dumb if we dig deeply enough.