A past employer thought it was a good idea to put up a leaderboard of who sent the most Slack messages. They celebrated the people at the top for being so active.
Predictably, everyone started talking in Slack like their jobs depended on it. Everyone was responding to everything. Instead of writing out a complete message and pressing enter, they'd send each fragment of the sentence as a new line.
The Slack leaderboard was never shown again. Unfortunately the habit remained because people were afraid they were going to be secretly judged by how much Slack activity they generated.
I expect the same thing is going to happen at companies who had token leaderboards. Once you've instilled that fear in people, they internalize the expectation.
Reminds me of the place I worked at where I got in trouble because I was the only person writing JIRA tickets. Instead of bitching out the product manager or the tester for not writing tickets, they just complained to me. And if I wrote a ticket about how we could speed up the 40 minute build to 15 minutes I'd have to explain "How does this change improve the customer experience?" to which I answered "If the build was faster the customer would have had the product six months ago"
I worked somewhere that made time from PR being sent for review and ready to merge be a metric for the reviewers. Not time to add feedback in each round. Total time elapsed.
You have to realize that if you set a measure, you're actually setting a goal for your employees. There is no such thing as a meaningless metric; why else would you measure it?
No amount of "this isn't used for anything" will change that. It's inherent in human nature in the 21st century to believe any and all metrics will be used against them, and therefore must be gamed.
It's why you also have to set UNBELIEVABLY clear goals and have incentives tied to those goals. Incentives meaning money. If you want to measure things, measure them. But have clear, consistent, and meaningful goals tied to bonuses or something if you want a thing done correctly.
That says that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
My argument is that in the 21st century, a time of great data use without deep understanding, any measure at all will inherently become a goal to be gamed.
I worked at a place that argued that nobody would game the metrics because it would be wrong and they never stated what the metrics were… while I was gaming the metrics and they were praising me for being one of the best on the team.
Are you saying what people are hoping to achieve with stupid goals? Because yeah, obviously. But the point is that they're stupid, so they don't achieve that, and that failure is 100% knowable in most scenarios.
What is about silicon valley leaders not understanding basic economics or business management? These kind of cargo cult tactics would not fly in any other industry.
It wasn't leadership doing this though. Any meta IC can generate internal apps and dashboards. This was unofficial and unsupported. Some random IC just made it for fun. Management is usually pretty lax with stuff like this (plenty of games and joke internal apps) so they left it up until it became a problem.
I still don't understand how Mark Zuckerberg has any serious investors, he went on this AI tangent and has absolutely nothing to show for it, despite FB / Meta having built some key tech in the space. He needs to stop trying to do something "different" and literally try and build a serious coding agent he can sell, he could have probably had something worthwhile in that space by now.
He started being drastically more serious into AI in 2022, and 2023 and he has nothing to show for it.
Heck, he could have rented GPUs the way Elon did at this point and either mended the bleeding or stopped it, not sure how many he has, but it beats losing this badly.
If he doesn't wake up and learn how to business, I suspect he will lose his empire he's built up for himself.
>he could have rented GPUs the way Elon did at this point
"Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports Meta building cloud business to sell excess AI capacity, Bloomberg News reports"
I know right? What did the leadership think would happen when they give some of the worlds greatest software engineers (supportably), a easily quantifiable metric to target?
The leaderboard wasn't leadership generated, it was engineer generated from internally available data. The leadership target is "impact" from ai tools.
What a wonderful scapegoat! Technically it's all "engineer created" because the managers generally don't do technical work. I bet many managers pushed their reports to increase their usage during their 1:1 meetings based on data from the leaderboard. If management had any sense that it was a bad metric, they had ample time to get ahead of it and take it down and provide appropriate guidance. Instead, predictably, they waited until it was a full on disaster and a crisis before acting.
At one point there were over 70 different token maxing dashboards as the management had a game of whack a mole trying to remove them. There definitely was encouragement from management about a year ago to increase ai usage, but once Claude code was allowed, they didn't really need to encourage anyone any more.
My company has an AI leaderboard and ONE ranking to be this, AND OTHER rankings like efficiency (loc merged per token). No one is so stupid that they think any single one of this is to be optimized (gamed) for.
Tech journalists have low opinion of people with actual skills who actually contribute to society, and when their opinions get posted here, it's often selectively echoed by people looking for a reason to feel smarter than the industry.
Now come on, there was a recent post where the author argued that infallible management knew this would happen, but was part of the double-secret-probation strategy to get the cogs to finally start using AI.
I still think this is true and it’s not obvious to me from the source article that Meta believes otherwise. I couldn’t find the full memo, do they claim the leaderboard or “tokenmaxxing” era was a mistake?
Even in firms that don't hold this board, giving unlimited AI to people means those who don't bother to learn technology can now deliver 100x their capacity, in very poor quality code
Given that Meta has run 5ish layoffs at this point, and everyone is in survival mode, what did they expect? Everyone wants to juice whatever numbers possible to keep their jobs.
Predictably, everyone started talking in Slack like their jobs depended on it. Everyone was responding to everything. Instead of writing out a complete message and pressing enter, they'd send each fragment of the sentence as a new line.
The Slack leaderboard was never shown again. Unfortunately the habit remained because people were afraid they were going to be secretly judged by how much Slack activity they generated.
I expect the same thing is going to happen at companies who had token leaderboards. Once you've instilled that fear in people, they internalize the expectation.