> As a young dev, it taught me that focusing only on KPIs can sometimes drive behaviors that don't align with the intended goals Something I've learned along t

> As a young dev, it taught me that focusing only on KPIs can sometimes drive behaviors that don't align with the intended goals Something I've learned along the way as well. A few times in my career I will end up working under a manager that insists only work "that can be explicitly measured" be performed. That means they forbade library upgrades, refactors, things like that because you couldn't really prove an improvement in customer metrics or immediate changes in eng productivity. I've also been at companies that follow that mantra more broadly and apply it to eng performance reviews. The entire culture turns into engineers focusing on either short term gains without regard for long term impact, or gaming metrics for meaningless changes and making them look important and impactful. Important but thankless work gets left behind because, again, it's work that is not "immediately measurable." End result is a bunch of features customers hate (eg dark patterns), and a rickety codebase that everyone is disincentivised fix or improve.