[dusklight]

Can you talk a bit about how facebook measures impact from their employees? How is it defined? How closely do you think it tracks real impact. How often do people figure out how to game it, and how is it usually gamed? Do you think it is possible to modify the definition of impact such that an ethical component can be added to it?

[notacoward]

I'm not GP, but I did work at Facebook until just over a year ago (two teams over ~3.5 years). For practical purposes, impact means measurable change of some metric(s). That can be latency, reliability, number of interviews done (really), efficiency, whatever. In theory non-measurable impacts are valued too, but in practice only if your boss and their peers org-wide who participate in "calibrations" are sympathetic. It's an uphill battle TBH, and not unrelated to why I left.

And yes, everybody games it. At the end of every half there's a flurry of "brag posts" about everyone's impactful projects. Better braggers get better results. Sometimes the metrics and measurements and analyses are pretty obviously suspect, but who wants to be the one to say so and never get positive feedback on their own review from that person or their friends ever again? Again, it comes down to consensus on whether the claimed improvements are real or not.

I was in infra (storage) so I don't know how it might be different in more product-oriented parts of the company. However, when the fundamental philosophy behind measuring and rewarding impact is questionable that sets an upper limit on how good things can be over there.