xkcd #2899: Goodhart's Law ( imgs.xkcd.com )

MirthfulAlembic , 4 months ago

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.

rynzcycle , 4 months ago

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.

You999 , 4 months ago

What’s even better is when your metrics are based on last year’s metrics so you better achieve exponential growth or start looking for another job.

MirthfulAlembic , 4 months ago

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.