It’s even better when these metrics explicitly become your yearly goals. Or department-wide metrics you have very little influence over. I sure hope all these people I don’t manage happen to achieve a specific error rate this year so I get a good bonus.
God this is too real. One place I worked loved to pick odd company wide metrics too. Instead of just like "profit", 50% of our bonus would be determined by how low a % held stock was against revenue, globally... I worked in marketing. Needless to say the "bonus" did not motivate anyone.
The year before last we achieved 1% test error rate in an area, and the bosses were seriously considering having the following year’s goal be 0%. Someone had to point out that if anyone had 1 error on Jan 1, we literally couldn’t do anything to achieve the goal the rest of the year and may as well give up entirely.
I’d not heard of this before, but this explains a lot of why my call center jobs were such BS.
We were expected to resolve networking, MS Exchange and VoIP issues in 20 minutes or less on average, which just resulted in a lot more customers having to call back because all the agents had to try and rush to a solution without time to test.
We don’t test for false convictions, which are as good as true ones for furthering careers in prosecution and law enforcement.
We don’t know if our prison population is 10% innocent or 75% despite Blackstone’s ratio.
In fact, when someone isn’t successfully convicted, it’s assumed the suspect got off on a technicality rather than continuing the investigation to find other suspects.
It’s wildly under-taught. It explains like half of all problems in the world. Education: “teaching to the test.” Economics: optimizing GDP at the expense of non-material well-being. Maximizing shareholder value by selling out employees and enshittifying your product. Software: “data-driven decision making” optimizing short -term gains over long-term because they are more measurable. That’s just off the top of my head.
The corporate bureaucracy is as much a product of the overall system, and just as much a slave to its incentives, as you or I. Though granted, the level of self-awareness of their role in the system is on average pretty low. With few exceptions, there is nobody at the wheel of problems like these. Worrying about whose fault it is is usually a waste of time.
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