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Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the

Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned. One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.

api 2y ago
The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.... The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything. I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
- zusammen 2y ago
  [dead]
- djmips 2y ago
  Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.
the_snooze 2y ago
It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?
  - Avicebron 2y ago
    There's chance that maybe there exists a revenue stream that increases by further applying that policy across a system that you don't have access to?
  - LeifCarrotson 2y ago
    The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale. Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers. Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient. But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!
    - xg15 2y ago
      The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.
      - majormajor 2y ago
        What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse, arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group? Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux? And "well they could just learn how to [code or configure text files or whatever]" for these purposes counts as worse off, IMO - more time spent on something that used to kinda-sorta-at-least-work-predictably for them.
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.
majormajor 2y ago
The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows. Everyone needs to advocate for themselves. A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own. If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad. And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.
- suzzer99 2y ago
  > The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows. 100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.
- stouset 2y ago
  Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat. Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block. The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work. Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.
chinchilla2020 2y ago
> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.
- Clubber 2y ago
  You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.
animuchan 2y ago
What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup. One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that. The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.) (The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)
- grg0 2y ago
  The classic one too is that as somebody who puts out the fires, you get all the praise; whereas if you just do the damn job right from the beginning, nobody notices. Corollary: create as many fires as you can, just don't completely burn the whole thing to the ground.

api 2y ago

The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.... The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything. I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.

zusammen 2y ago
[dead]
djmips 2y ago
Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.

the_snooze 2y ago

It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?
- Avicebron 2y ago
  There's chance that maybe there exists a revenue stream that increases by further applying that policy across a system that you don't have access to?
- LeifCarrotson 2y ago
  The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale. Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers. Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient. But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!
  - xg15 2y ago
    The question is if the Kingdom would then still be worth surviving if life for everyone there ends up being miserable.
    - majormajor 2y ago
      What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse, arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group? Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux? And "well they could just learn how to [code or configure text files or whatever]" for these purposes counts as worse off, IMO - more time spent on something that used to kinda-sorta-at-least-work-predictably for them.
sidewndr46 2y ago
While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.

majormajor 2y ago

The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows. Everyone needs to advocate for themselves. A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own. If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad. And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.

suzzer99 2y ago
> The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows. 100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.
pdimitar 2y ago
I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.
stouset 2y ago
Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat. Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block. The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work. Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.

chinchilla2020 2y ago

> Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. Never thought I'd see an intelligent point made on hackernews, but there it is. You are absolutely correct. This really hit home for me.

Clubber 2y ago
You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.

animuchan 2y ago

What you're describing was precisely our culture at the last startup. One group plans ahead and overall do a solid job, so they're rarely swamped, never pull all-nighters. People are never promoted, they're thought of as slacking and un-startup-like. Top performers leave regularly because of that. The other group is behind on even the "blocker"-level issues, people are stressed and overworked, weekends are barely a thing. But — they get praised for hard work. The heroes. (And then leave after burning out completely.) (The company was eventually acquired, but employees got pennies. So it worked out well for the founders, while summarily ratfucking everyone else involved. I'm afraid this is very common.)

grg0 2y ago
The classic one too is that as somebody who puts out the fires, you get all the praise; whereas if you just do the damn job right from the beginning, nobody notices. Corollary: create as many fires as you can, just don't completely burn the whole thing to the ground.