[charles_f]

The word impact has become a trigger to me. It is both sufficiently abstract and seemingly concrete, and allows managers to do pretty much what they want from it.

I remember one telling me "I'm all about impact", and then praise people who built arguably impressive but totally useless and uncalled for shit, while others who sacrificed their souls preventing entire rotten stacks to fall got a "meh, they had a huge opportunity and didn't seize it".

An impact is what's happening when something hits something else. I prefer not to have impacts.

[Izkata]

A step further: The most spectacular impacts are when something crashes and burns.

[FridgeSeal]

I have previously worked at a place where some of the engineering teams would build incredibly poor products and features, which would be on fire all the time (because it would fall over if you looked at it wrong), and they got constant praise from management because they “put in the extra mile to fix an issue in prod”.

An issues they caused.

It’s not like they were operating at a velocity greater than other teams-they spent so much time and headcount putting out fires, that they instead spent 10 minutes thinking about how to build it better, they probably would have 1. Finished it sooner and 2. Ended up delivering more features and value as a result.