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Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by acdha on Thursday August 10, 2023 @08:53AM (#37075534)
> Sure they can, e.g. on-time delivery (or even better shipments missing the promised delivery date) is a ratio. Or inventory turn rates, there you actually want people to attack the denominator.

These are good in that they’re directly aligned with business outcomes but you still need sensible judgement in the loop. For example, say there’s an ice storm or heat wave which affects delivery times for a large region – you need someone smart enough to recognize that and not robotically punish people for failing to hit a now-unrealistic goal, or you’re going to see things like people marking orders as canceled or faking deliveries to avoid penalties or losing bonuses.

One example I saw at a large old school vendor was having performance measured directly by units delivered, which might seem reasonable since it’s totally aligned with the company’s interests, except that they were hit by a delay on new CPUs and so most of their customers were waiting for the latest product. Some sales people were penalized and left, and the cagier ones played games having their best clients order the old stuff, never unpack it, and return it on the first day of the next quarter - they got the max internal discount for their troubles so that circus cost way more money than doing nothing would have, but that number was law and none of the senior managers were willing to provide nuance.

Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by hef19898 on Thursday August 10, 2023 @09:32AM (#37075952)
Selling something in one quarter, with the understanding that the customer returns it the next, is also clean cut accounting fraud.
Re:CNET is deleting old articles to try to improve its Googl... by acdha on Thursday August 10, 2023 @10:38AM (#37076729)
Yeah, every part of this was a “don’t incentivize doing this”. I doubt anyone would ever be caught for that since there was nothing in writing but it was a complete farce of management. I heard those details over a beer with one of the people involved and he was basically wryly chuckling about how that vendor had good engineers and terrible management. They’re gone now so that caught up with them.