hadukla wrote:
jkhayc wrote:
1) I'm paraphrasing here, but a rough quote from one of the interviewees was "in no other realm is your success so tied to your performance." I couldn't help but think that in EVERY job your success is completely tied to your performance.
As an HR professional, I wish this were true. Even companies that specifically say success is tied to job performance struggle to make that connection.
+1
it's simple to measure the fastest swimmer.
it's impossible to measure performance in any kind of meaningful way for most jobs.
Teachers ? here in the US we had education 'reform' based on measuring teacher performance. This turned out to be disastrous and cruel, as teacher performance as measured by student results, depends on multiple factors that are completely outside the teachers' control - poor kids that don't get breakfast or a quiet place to do homework or enough security to focus during class, etc etc.
Hospitals ? the NHS decided to measure performance by how quickly patients were assessed in emergency rooms. So the hospitals staffed positions known as the 'hello nurse' who did the assessment quickly, after which the patient had to wait indefinitely for treatment..
https://www.bmj.com/.../315/7101/143.6.full Software ? my (software company) bonus is tied to company performance, as well as those managerial shibboleths known as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Many of these are not under my control. Those that are, are best maximised by gaming the work environment, which I decline. Lines of code per day used to be popular. It's easy to write lots of lines of code, harder to make them work as they are supposed to, harder still to maintain those reams of unnecessary lines.
Bankers ? Wells Fargo set ambitious sales quotas for its bankers, which could only be achieved by fraud, which they duly performed.
This is universally the case for pay-performance initiatives. Every company that tries them is doomed to rediscover Goodhart's Law, any metric can be maximized in an unproductive way.
my favorite KPI fables,
1. from not_shax on twitter,
We've discovered that some bees are carrying pollen between flowers and not just nectar. Our KPIs are purely focussed on nectar. Pollen does not help with our quarterly targets and is slowing workers down. Any bees found carrying pollen in future will be fired.
Next year:
Our bees aren't finding enough flowers to collect nectar this year. So we need to double down on disciplining any bees found carrying pollen.
2. from idlewords.com,
a tale of Soviet Russia. The Five-Year plan for a nail factory measured productivity by how many nails they could make. So they made millions of tiny useless nails. The planners decided to evaluate by weight instead, so the factory made a single giant nail.
In Olympic sports we see the same factors at work. Once this is professional and real money is on the table, sport is distorted into a kind of moloch-machine for chewing up young people. From my son's high school swim team, all of them who had ambitions and trained year-round, are now broken down after surgeries or quit in exhaustion.
The KPIs for sport administrators and governments are the fastest possible athletes, produced by whatever means. Maximising these gives us the doped Soviet athletes, Sky cycling, etc etc..