What’s the alternative to this? Without having a fallback to human driven judgement that itself can be gamed.
Maybe you’d suggest that the VP must ask all their direct reports to verify it manually. Then you rely on each person below you to have good judgement and also act in good faith. The director asks the managers who asks the leads who may or may not give accurate reports.
This isn't "don't measure things" it's, "understand that when you measure something, it often turns into a goal. This can have unexpected consequences".
Even with human judgement this happens. Yhrtr are jokes about payment by line of code that have existed for decades.
The main thing is we need to measure secondary things. User satisfaction, defect rate, bugfix rate, etc (and this isn't to say that those are good measures that work everywhere. They may or may not.)
At the end of the day, the challenge is to think, and not assume they a number means what you think it means, or more or fewer of something will always be good.
For a book, the local value of a page may not accurately represent the value added to the completed book. In fiction, a relatively boring page may be intentional as a kind of palate cleanser. In non-fiction, an early hard to understand section may make later sections easier to understand and avoid unlearning.
In programming, it may be challenging to distinguish between You Aren't Going To Need It (wasted work that adds complexity) and brillant foresight that avoids trying to retrofit an abstraction over independently developed code.
I am not sure that a manager needs to reliably judge the quality of the product to reliably deliver quality products. Judging skill and integrity (and promoting the development of such) does not seem to require having the same skill.
The author proposes that the corollary to Goodheart's law is:
"Only measure that which you are comfortable turning into a target."
This is an interesting thought but I disagree and certainly logically wouldn't call it a corollary.
As someone managing a system, one approach is to have a balanced set of measurements and to hold some of them back so they can't be gamed by those being measured. I.e. have more measurememts than targets so you can detect alignment drift.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 42.7 ms ] threadMaybe you’d suggest that the VP must ask all their direct reports to verify it manually. Then you rely on each person below you to have good judgement and also act in good faith. The director asks the managers who asks the leads who may or may not give accurate reports.
It’s not clear that’s any better?
Even with human judgement this happens. Yhrtr are jokes about payment by line of code that have existed for decades.
The main thing is we need to measure secondary things. User satisfaction, defect rate, bugfix rate, etc (and this isn't to say that those are good measures that work everywhere. They may or may not.)
At the end of the day, the challenge is to think, and not assume they a number means what you think it means, or more or fewer of something will always be good.
In programming, it may be challenging to distinguish between You Aren't Going To Need It (wasted work that adds complexity) and brillant foresight that avoids trying to retrofit an abstraction over independently developed code.
I am not sure that a manager needs to reliably judge the quality of the product to reliably deliver quality products. Judging skill and integrity (and promoting the development of such) does not seem to require having the same skill.
"Only measure that which you are comfortable turning into a target."
This is an interesting thought but I disagree and certainly logically wouldn't call it a corollary.
As someone managing a system, one approach is to have a balanced set of measurements and to hold some of them back so they can't be gamed by those being measured. I.e. have more measurememts than targets so you can detect alignment drift.
If you can't trust your org to properly set its targets and need to blind yourself from the metrics you really want, you're in a pretty dire place.