[mysticllama]

i worked at a FAANG co and managed to make it 3 years focusing on solving problems that widely bothered users. there were several instances where i had to -fight- to ship critical bug fixes because the fixes so-happened to regress an obscure metric someone was baby-sitting…

the first time this happened, i felt like my brain was going to explode -- so wait, you want me to leave the main app feed broken and people pissed off because the comment-notes-experience-home-ex team's weekly comment rate is slightly regressing?

writing this out, not sure how i lasted as long as i did.

[InsideOutSanta]

"you want me to leave the main app feed broken"

This reminds me of when we introduced Yammer at a company. Initially, it worked great, everybody loved it, it was super valuable to share information internally. Then, at some point, the feed broke and it somehow started demoting the most valuable posts, requiring much more time to be sure that you had caught up on everything relevant to you.

Then I read an interview with the CEO where he bragged how they were data-driven and were optimizing for engagement. My guess is that somebody had figured out that hiding important information created more "engagement" because people now had to spend more time searching for the stuff that was relevant to them.

This person probably got a promotion, and we switched to a different system half a year later.

[mysticllama]

Yes, exactly -- the fixation on "metrics-driven development" created perverse incentives (i.e. cobra effect). People would ship bugs and broken shit because it'd bump engagement, like you're referencing; nevermind the fact that the engagement win was because people were clearly flummoxed by a meaningfully worse user experience and it took them longer to do shit. I saw this happen many times, gaming metrics by doing backwards things would definitely get rewarded.

[kridsdale1]

I worked on Facebook News Feed for a number of years. I wonder if we were coworkers. This is what it was like.