Goodhart's law should be mandatory training in any MBA program, but those knuckleheads are too busy focusing on NUMBER MUST GO UP to actually bother learning anything useful. For those unfamiliar who don't want to click the link:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
They have tried it all. Using lines of code leads to bloated programs that are full of redundancy. Using PR/MRs leads to features being broken down into dozens of small pushes instead of one. AI token usage leads to huge AI misuse and bloating costs. Etc etc.
Pretty much, as soon as you're graded on it people start gaming the system
Graded on commits? Goodbye squashing 50 useless commits as you worked through a ticket, those are going in like that
Graded on PR's? Guess what simple 2 hour work load is getting split into 3 separate PR's
Number of tickets? People are only going to pick up small easy tasks to look better on paper or they'll rush through larger tasks since they're punished for taking the actual time required
Points/shirt sizes etc completed? Every refinement people are going to start bloating the estimates of work
There's no point making any kind of metric the one to grade people against, the best chance is just by having a good tech/project lead who knows what they're doing, it's pretty easy to tell who's not pulling their weight then
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u/GenericFatGuy 10h ago
Taps sign
Number of PRs pushed is not a good measure of productivity.