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by khzw8yyy
918 days ago
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The problem with OKRs is that they are a religion. Once a metric is established it becomes a god to worship at the expense of all else, until the harmful effects of such single mindedness become painful enough that the old god is deposed and a new god put in its place. With the same myopic thought process. True leaders call this blindness "focusing on what's important". Simplifying something as complex as an engineering team or a company down to a couple of variables cannot possibly model the real world. You can't say this out loud though, because this goes against established leadership culture. You can't be one of them philosophers. We've got to have achievable goals here! Example: once upon a time a goal was instituted where tasks were supposed to be assigned to the engineer with the most experience in a particular area. Focus! Faster time to close a ticket! Happier engineers - they work on what they are good at! See the problem yet? Meeting the goal actually made it so that there were a ton of bottlenecks. If an engineer was out sick the team lost an expert in a particular area. Engineers got bored working on the same thing day in and day out. And because the OKR killed knowledge transfer it became impossible to tackle a problem as a group. And so the old metric was declared a problem and a new ridiculously limited model of the world was put in its place. |
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Making your efforts focused on a thing seems like a good idea, given proper research and discovery is done and the metric to improve is measurable and meaningful.
I think the criticism you are voicing is more down to a management style rather than OKRs. I’ve never would isolate my team members in areas and prevent knowledge being focused in one person. Always let the group tackle the problem and let them decide on who is going to work on it. Encourage pair programming and especially during the problem discovery, involve the entire team (when tackling a large, new problem).
Smaller stuff can be picked up by the same engineer. A bug fix here, a small adjustment there. But as soon as you introduce a big chunk of business logic, it’s important to bring along the team. I feel like that’s not what happens to you, but I don’t see this as a fault of OKRs