- Regularly rotate personnel
- Reward review by a random board
A review based on a blend of quantitative metrics (basics/table stakes) and qualitative metrics (everything else) prevents quantitative-metrics-gaming from dominating.
The system has a ton of flaws, is inefficient, and produces suboptimal outcomes a fair amount of the time, but damned if it doesn't scale.
Goodhart's law!
The book "The Tyranny of Metrics" by Jerry Muller talks about this phenomenon in depth, giving many historical examples of metrics making systems worse instead of better. Very good read, I'd recommend it to anyone.
Me too! Fortunately, Google was smart enough to turn it up from "law about metrics".
> The book "The Tyranny of Metrics" by Jerry Muller talks about this phenomenon in depth, giving many historical examples of metrics making systems worse instead of better. Very good read, I'd recommend it to anyone.
Thanks! I'll have a look.
Productivity (of something...) is ostensibly the intent of a capitalist venture, but the owner and ultimately prioritize anything they prefer. This is a problem for any hope of rational practice.
While that is true, the whole argument against metrics as goals is that they decrease productivity, which goes against a common interest of both capitalist and communist societies.
Productivity as a goal simply makes sense in the real world, regardless of whether there's an owner who is chasing profit, or a worker collective who has to meet their planned quota for the planned economy. The state of facts is such that binding metrics to rewards is harmful to their overall reliability, regardless of which economic system it's happening in.
Besides, why should anyone trust a leftist in power? We already know your lot will immediately outlaw and jail the opposition and pretend their uni-party system is "democratic". So I don't think you actually care about owners and power, you're just mad that you aren't in power perpetually.
You can see similar behavior (hiding issues, lying about them) in any scenario in which punishment is tied to the failure to meet the metrics. When the metric becomes the goal, people will game the metric in order to avoid punishment and/or reap the rewards.
The only kind of measurement that doesn't cause this behavior is the neutral measurement - measurement which is guaranteed not to change the decisions directly, but only serve as information which is later used in high-level optimization of systemic processes. In context of software companies, it would mean that status reports should only be reviewed in combination to other factors, such as tool used, features implemented, deadlines tightened, etc., and only to further understand how to optimize the process to avoid human error.
It's risky to implement that, because you have to trust your employees enough to say "you won't be fired because of your metrics, ever", but I believe it's less worse than having people falsely report good metrics.