Yet another good example of the saying "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I'm also reminded of a similar Chinese saying: 上有政策下有对策。 Loosely translated as "the higher-ups have policies, the lower-downs have antipolicies." The other analogy is squeezing a bag of water: if you push one place, another place pops out to compensate, and if you squeeze everywhere and too hard, it pops.

I think it's not so much unintended consequences as it is perverse incentives.

It's the same as measuring a programmers output by Lines of Code, you're just going to get a heaping mass of code that could be done in 1/10th of the lines.

agreed I worked as a consultant for a company that had exactly that problem. They based promotions based on lines of working code.

Result: You would see huge bloobs of autogenerated code getting shipped that could have been done with about 5% of that code, and then later get discarded by security as a security risk.

Even after my consulting(I was hired to fine our how mouch of there code is rly a security risk like there industry partners claim) they did not change there practice for 3 Years.

Im surprised the Company even survived, but it did and after 3 Years a big restructering basicly fired all of IT management.

It's weird to call these "unintended consequences."

What we know about human behavior definitively indicates that having a sense of autonomy and control is essential to motivation/performance. It's also obvious that stress increases under the knowledge that someone is monitoring you. Hell even the ancient Greeks probably understood the perils of micromanagement...

In the case of readily measurable output in blue-collar work, it seems obvious that a component of compensation should scale proportionate to productivity, so that you're rewarding high performers instead of implicitly penalizing everyone uniformly. And then you just fire (obvious) chronic underperformers, so that you still gain the advantages from there being a fear of repercussions.

I used to work somewhere that gave us discounts on our health insurance based on our daily average # of steps taken. People would hook their fitbits up to drill bits and spin it around on electric drills to log 10k steps per day to get the $75/month discount.