I think aspects of big tech employee evaluations are to blame: - competitive or zero-sum performance evaluations (aka stack ranking) - short evaluation window

I think aspects of big tech employee evaluations are to blame: - competitive or zero-sum performance evaluations (aka stack ranking) - short evaluation windows (3 months or 6 months) - two consecutive bad evaluations get you terminated - KPI-driven evaluation: if you can't show numbers, you didn't do it This basically means: 1. Someone investing time in creating long-term value will always lose out to someone focused on short-term value and may actually get fired by this system. 2. Certain types of projects will never be worth doing in this incentive model. Quality improvements that can't be quantified are not worth doing. If it costs 10x more effort to quantify the impact of some work than actually doing it, that work will never get done. Any project that spans longer than the evaluation window (either to execute or to show results) is not worth doing. Small arbitrary quality improvements in different parts of the system are not worth doing.