xkcd #2899: Goodhart's Law
xkcd #2899: Goodhart's Law
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[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.
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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.
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.
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.