Here’s a good example of what happens when you incentivize quantity over quality: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/cannot-set-up-autom

Here’s a good example of what happens when you incentivize quantity over quality: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/cannot-set-up-automatic-forwarding-on-outlookcom/036e4d1b-94a5-4dc4-b850-6f0c1595d7ca https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/ca... It’s the classic support response of “try clearing your browser cache, delete all cookies, update to the latest versions of all software and drivers, then reboot your PC” when the questions was “why doesn’t outlook.com let me forward my emails any more?”. I’m pretty cynical of most peoples motivation these days. Your local coffee shop’s point-of-sale asks if you’d like to round up to the nearest dollar with the change going to charity? Sounds like someone’s Q2 goal was to improve community relations. As soon as they get that promotion, will they maintain the charity thing? Probably not. Another classic is the endless A/B testing to pursue growth metrics. Reddit can’t show you this video of a man calling his dog “f**king hilarious!” but if you sign in with the app and lie about your age it will. Or maybe it just “looks better” in the app, or some other carrot? One day they’ll just get the stick out and www.reddit.com will have a popup saying “we are now blocking 50% of IP addresses from web access to make you just use the damn app”. And don’t get me started on “we are experiencing high volumes of calls right now, please hold for the next available etc.” As if there’s anything unpredictable about call centre statistics! Whenever I hear this message, all I’m hearing is “in order to maximise productivity from our agents, this call centre deliberately understaffs to maintain 100% capacity throughout the working day… sorry!”. The idea of an agent taking a break due to a lull in calls is anathema. Tracking and being led by metrics is nothing if you don’t have a principled, moral, qualitative reason to be doing so in the first place.