[wpietri]

Totally. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

And as you say, managerial involvement is the problem. Managers and execs mostly get paid to appear to be in control, so having the appearance of control is vital to them, even if that makes the results wildly worse.

[brightball]

That is one of the all time best quotes that nobody is willing to hear.

[wpietri]

Which reminds me of one of the other great quotes: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

[jay_kyburz]

Actually, I think its dumb.

A better saying would be, you should only use your target as a measure.

If your target is working software, measure how well the software works.

[wpietri]

I don't think you quite get this.

In your imaginary case, what would your specific numerical measure be?

[mavelikara]

"We are not doing it like the FAANG companies" is a refrain you get from engineers themselves too.

[goostavos]

Surely uttered by people who haven't been at FAANG companies. It's not magical over here, people.

I've legit sat through 1.5 hour long calls with 6 other devs so we could watch our manager type notes into a presentation that he'll give to a collection of other managers who will only be half-listening until it's their turn to be visible, and all because some other, more powerful manager, decided this was important for the org to do.

It was layers of bureaucracy so deep I wasn't sure where I was anymore.

[Roboprog]

Like measuring nitrogen content as a proxy for protein?

[dkbrk]

Exactly, then unscrupulous people adulterate it with melamine to artificially boost measured protein.