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Reminds me of the time I had an OKR to reduce page load time by some ridiculous amount. The speed wasn’t even bad and there was no theory about how exactly it w

Reminds me of the time I had an OKR to reduce page load time by some ridiculous amount. The speed wasn’t even bad and there was no theory about how exactly it would help the product. We didn’t sell ads or anything like that. We ended up achieving our goal by greatly reducing the quality of all images to almost nothing, such that they looked like a rorschach test, and measuring performance on a fast internal network. Management was so happy they bought a white sheet cake and had the graph of improvement drawn on it in icing. The next quarter, customers started to complain and a new OKR was set to improve image quality by 50%. So we just reverted all the prior changes, and once again victory was declared. This company operated like this for the entire year I was there. I finally had to quit because I started to question my own sanity. Ever since that experience I have PTSD whenever someone says the word OKR.

kubb 3y ago
Classic management.
scott_w 3y ago
I have a comment with my own issues with OKRs but I do want to stick up for OKRs here: this really is a management problem and, let's be honest, they'd have fucked up any framework that was put in place (and a lack of framework would have probably been just as bad!)
- datadrivenangel 3y ago
  The problem is bad management. A handful of incompetent people can really mess up an organization.
- sc68cal 3y ago
  Yes but it's always framed as a failure of either procedure or the people they manage that failed them. Management itself can never fail it can only be failed
  - scott_w 3y ago
    I really don’t see how this counters my point at all…
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Do you blame Word for documents that make 0 sense because the contents are incoherent? Because that's basically what's happening here. The OKR in question were non nonsense and contradictory, but that's completely irrelevant to if OKRs are useful or not.
    - xorcist 3y ago
      Well, it should at least settle any claim that OKRs are useful in themselves. They need to be useful to be useful. "Useful things are useful" would make for a very short management book though. We're also getting very close to a "no true scotsman" argument. If something has been tried several times and the outcome never came out as expected, maybe there's something more to it than that it wasn't implemented completely right. Not everything that's good in theory is useful in the real world.
Lutger 3y ago
I respect your PTSD. And it does sound like that management would be able to burn out developers with any kind of methodology. I mean, you are lucky they were not into SAFe or you might have quit the field altogether.
szundi 3y ago
OKRs are fine, sadly idiots fill it up with content
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "fine", but OKRs in most cases can't work, because a key result means a number, and numbers can be gamed. 1. Frequently you can't know ahead of time what is a good number to have. You can only pretend to know what is a good number, and people do pretend as if it can be done and everyone plays along with this bs. 2. You can get to that number in multitude of different ways, in many cases by not actually making the product better. 3. You might in the middle of progress realise that the path should be completely different, but now you are tied to that OKR. They just don't make any sense at all, and at best they can take focus away from what should intuitively matter. "I know I should do X to actually benefit the product, but I do Y because this is what gets us to the Key Result.". OKRs can be actively harmful because they take focus away from what matters, and you can't put a single number on those things. OKRs when planning also focus you to plan poorly, again instead of figuring out how to conceptually make the product better, you set those arbitrary metric restrictions which can only stray you away from what you should actually plan to do.
  - hkt 3y ago
    They're also a bit of an antipattern - agile is about learning and responding on the fly. Add an OKR and you immediately distort that and it turns out your agile methodology is just a couple of small waterfalls in a trench coat.
    - TheCleric 3y ago
      The majority of agile processes I've seen is "small waterfalls in a trenchcoat".
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > "I know I should do X to actually benefit the product, but I do Y because this is what gets us to the Key Result.". it just means you think you are smarter than person who decided on Y, which may be true or maybe not true regardless of OKR process. > You can only pretend to know what is a good number, and people do pretend as if it can be done and everyone plays along with this bs. there are many business decisions based on educated guesses, not just OKRs.
hkt 3y ago
That's hilarious. I'd have been horrified too, but I hope you can look back and laugh. It goes to show how utterly insane management types can be, and how they need to be hemmed in with empiricism and held to account for wasting time.
pjc50 3y ago
OKRs seem to be the reinvention of Taylorism for software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management ; with all that implies about management relations. This is rather like trying to do Freudianism in the 21st century. We've moved on. There are better ways. Naive Taylorism tends to degenerate into Stakhanovism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov More people should learn from Deming instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
- marcinzm 3y ago
  OKRs are simply an extension of the fact that companies and departments need some sort of 3-6 month roadmap. That is to ensure cross-department and external communication can be done somewhat smoothly. Waterfall used to do this inherently. Now we've got OKRs and SAFe.
  - xorcist 3y ago
    The same can be said cynically: Companies are inherently not agile, any push towards fast and iterative decision making will generate a counter-force towards quarterly plans under a new name. SAFe is one form this counter-force can take, characterized as using a lot of complicated verbiage which makes it an easy sell for consultants. I'm not saying this is wrong. Maybe quarterly plans on a fundamental level is what companies in our market economy is. Perhaps we shouldn't be agile on a company level. But let's at least be clear about what the strategy is.
- aeonik 3y ago
  Can you expand what you mean by "degenerating into Stakhanovism"? I read your Wikipedia article, and I also read this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement I have a vague understanding of what the movement was, but I'm unsure how you are relating it back here. Are the degenerated attributes related to the "puffery" and "theatre".
  - 3y ago
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
OKR is another tool for the managers not to feel useless. The problem is when they are also incompetent. OKR is an integral part of company brainwashing of employees. OKRs are good for the management people, but it should be not enforced on those who do the actual work, like engineers. They could set goals like, one coffee per week, report to the higher ups that coffee consumption is good, and thats it. ;)
napoleoncomplex 3y ago
Have to add a different perspective here (the management one), just to try to give a potential explanation. I did pretty much the same thing to my team, though with a lot more background as to why. We were severely rocked by a Google search ranking update, and basically lost 70% of traffic overnight. We had no idea why, none of our metrics over the past years changed, but it all went to shit. In the days after, we set out a plan to try to recover this ranking, even though we had no idea what we need to do. Page speed was one of those metrics we set out to improve, and even though it wasn't bad, but it wasn't exceptional. As with other SEO stuff, there was no guarantee this will help, but we needed to try, along with a few other things. After we fixed it (along with a few other things), there was very small growth initially, and it took another 9 months for our SEO to fully recover, but we did fully recover. Was it Page speed? Who knows, but 30 million website visits were earned back one way or another. I can easily see from an employee's perspective, they could react like you, "why the hell am I doing page speed shit, we're already fine, this is bullshit". Especially because the entire field of SEO sounds like total random guesswork to a lot of engineers. But I expect the team to have the common sense not to completely fuck up the product in the mean time and/or fake results, even if the metric we're measuring and improving is page speed. I don't think that's an OKR issue, that's just not giving a shit issue that no management approach can solve (on both sides, since the management spent no time explaining why page speed is important to improve).
al_borland 3y ago
Sounds like they were doing it wrong. At a high level, senior management shouldn’t care about tiny optimizations like that, and their OKRs should be higher level. Your team should make OKRs that support those higher level OKRs in the best way it can, which is probably not those meaningless optimizations. Easy to say, but hard to do. I have also had my OKRs dictated to me by upper/middle management. Sometimes I think I was the only one in the room who read Measure What Matters.
tdeck 3y ago
This is because you're trying to actually achieve your OKRs. Everywhere I have ever worked we understood that OKRs are frequently not achievable, fudged the numbers are OKR grading time and the still frequently had red OKRs. At one point I used to push for actually specific, measurable, achievable OKRs but I quickly learned that nobody cares and it's a waste of effort.

kubb 3y ago

Classic management.

scott_w 3y ago

I have a comment with my own issues with OKRs but I do want to stick up for OKRs here: this really is a management problem and, let's be honest, they'd have fucked up any framework that was put in place (and a lack of framework would have probably been just as bad!)

datadrivenangel 3y ago
The problem is bad management. A handful of incompetent people can really mess up an organization.
sc68cal 3y ago
Yes but it's always framed as a failure of either procedure or the people they manage that failed them. Management itself can never fail it can only be failed
- scott_w 3y ago
  I really don’t see how this counters my point at all…
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Do you blame Word for documents that make 0 sense because the contents are incoherent? Because that's basically what's happening here. The OKR in question were non nonsense and contradictory, but that's completely irrelevant to if OKRs are useful or not.
  - xorcist 3y ago
    Well, it should at least settle any claim that OKRs are useful in themselves. They need to be useful to be useful. "Useful things are useful" would make for a very short management book though. We're also getting very close to a "no true scotsman" argument. If something has been tried several times and the outcome never came out as expected, maybe there's something more to it than that it wasn't implemented completely right. Not everything that's good in theory is useful in the real world.

Lutger 3y ago

I respect your PTSD. And it does sound like that management would be able to burn out developers with any kind of methodology. I mean, you are lucky they were not into SAFe or you might have quit the field altogether.

szundi 3y ago

OKRs are fine, sadly idiots fill it up with content

mewpmewp2 3y ago
Not sure what you mean by "fine", but OKRs in most cases can't work, because a key result means a number, and numbers can be gamed. 1. Frequently you can't know ahead of time what is a good number to have. You can only pretend to know what is a good number, and people do pretend as if it can be done and everyone plays along with this bs. 2. You can get to that number in multitude of different ways, in many cases by not actually making the product better. 3. You might in the middle of progress realise that the path should be completely different, but now you are tied to that OKR. They just don't make any sense at all, and at best they can take focus away from what should intuitively matter. "I know I should do X to actually benefit the product, but I do Y because this is what gets us to the Key Result.". OKRs can be actively harmful because they take focus away from what matters, and you can't put a single number on those things. OKRs when planning also focus you to plan poorly, again instead of figuring out how to conceptually make the product better, you set those arbitrary metric restrictions which can only stray you away from what you should actually plan to do.
- hkt 3y ago
  They're also a bit of an antipattern - agile is about learning and responding on the fly. Add an OKR and you immediately distort that and it turns out your agile methodology is just a couple of small waterfalls in a trench coat.
  - TheCleric 3y ago
    The majority of agile processes I've seen is "small waterfalls in a trenchcoat".
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > "I know I should do X to actually benefit the product, but I do Y because this is what gets us to the Key Result.". it just means you think you are smarter than person who decided on Y, which may be true or maybe not true regardless of OKR process. > You can only pretend to know what is a good number, and people do pretend as if it can be done and everyone plays along with this bs. there are many business decisions based on educated guesses, not just OKRs.

hkt 3y ago

That's hilarious. I'd have been horrified too, but I hope you can look back and laugh. It goes to show how utterly insane management types can be, and how they need to be hemmed in with empiricism and held to account for wasting time.

pjc50 3y ago

OKRs seem to be the reinvention of Taylorism for software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management ; with all that implies about management relations. This is rather like trying to do Freudianism in the 21st century. We've moved on. There are better ways. Naive Taylorism tends to degenerate into Stakhanovism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov More people should learn from Deming instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

marcinzm 3y ago
OKRs are simply an extension of the fact that companies and departments need some sort of 3-6 month roadmap. That is to ensure cross-department and external communication can be done somewhat smoothly. Waterfall used to do this inherently. Now we've got OKRs and SAFe.
- xorcist 3y ago
  The same can be said cynically: Companies are inherently not agile, any push towards fast and iterative decision making will generate a counter-force towards quarterly plans under a new name. SAFe is one form this counter-force can take, characterized as using a lot of complicated verbiage which makes it an easy sell for consultants. I'm not saying this is wrong. Maybe quarterly plans on a fundamental level is what companies in our market economy is. Perhaps we shouldn't be agile on a company level. But let's at least be clear about what the strategy is.
aeonik 3y ago
Can you expand what you mean by "degenerating into Stakhanovism"? I read your Wikipedia article, and I also read this one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakhanovite_movement I have a vague understanding of what the movement was, but I'm unsure how you are relating it back here. Are the degenerated attributes related to the "puffery" and "theatre".
- 3y ago

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

OKR is another tool for the managers not to feel useless. The problem is when they are also incompetent. OKR is an integral part of company brainwashing of employees. OKRs are good for the management people, but it should be not enforced on those who do the actual work, like engineers. They could set goals like, one coffee per week, report to the higher ups that coffee consumption is good, and thats it. ;)

napoleoncomplex 3y ago

Have to add a different perspective here (the management one), just to try to give a potential explanation. I did pretty much the same thing to my team, though with a lot more background as to why. We were severely rocked by a Google search ranking update, and basically lost 70% of traffic overnight. We had no idea why, none of our metrics over the past years changed, but it all went to shit. In the days after, we set out a plan to try to recover this ranking, even though we had no idea what we need to do. Page speed was one of those metrics we set out to improve, and even though it wasn't bad, but it wasn't exceptional. As with other SEO stuff, there was no guarantee this will help, but we needed to try, along with a few other things. After we fixed it (along with a few other things), there was very small growth initially, and it took another 9 months for our SEO to fully recover, but we did fully recover. Was it Page speed? Who knows, but 30 million website visits were earned back one way or another. I can easily see from an employee's perspective, they could react like you, "why the hell am I doing page speed shit, we're already fine, this is bullshit". Especially because the entire field of SEO sounds like total random guesswork to a lot of engineers. But I expect the team to have the common sense not to completely fuck up the product in the mean time and/or fake results, even if the metric we're measuring and improving is page speed. I don't think that's an OKR issue, that's just not giving a shit issue that no management approach can solve (on both sides, since the management spent no time explaining why page speed is important to improve).

al_borland 3y ago

Sounds like they were doing it wrong. At a high level, senior management shouldn’t care about tiny optimizations like that, and their OKRs should be higher level. Your team should make OKRs that support those higher level OKRs in the best way it can, which is probably not those meaningless optimizations. Easy to say, but hard to do. I have also had my OKRs dictated to me by upper/middle management. Sometimes I think I was the only one in the room who read Measure What Matters.

tdeck 3y ago

This is because you're trying to actually achieve your OKRs. Everywhere I have ever worked we understood that OKRs are frequently not achievable, fudged the numbers are OKR grading time and the still frequently had red OKRs. At one point I used to push for actually specific, measurable, achievable OKRs but I quickly learned that nobody cares and it's a waste of effort.