Technology

It's the old lines of code metric style of thinking.

The people in charge only know line go up means better and bigger number is better.

Its only when things go wrong and someone ELI5 for them that they listen. And even then it'll wear off in a week and they'll be on to their next make the number bigger obsession.

Nobody is asking the question "If you have to use AI that much, doesn't that mean you aren't very good at your job? 🤔"

Right? How do you even cheat on a ruleset this dumb? You don‘t. It was a stupid contest from the start.

It only makes sense if

• you want to drive up adoption because
  • you're confident in usefulness already
  • want to find out about usefulness and need the userbase and usage for it
• you have ulterior motives to push for AI adoption

I can imagine leadership - disconnected from real work and any practical AI use experience - being misinformed and misguided into believing marketing and hype-cycle about gains. It also doesn't seem implausible that leadership wants to drive up adoption to quickly gain feedback and results about usefulness and gains/loss.

In good faith, it requires a certain mindset (no care about the waste or potential loss or risk) and distance from practice. Not implausible, though, in my eyes.

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/ https://hacker-laws.com/#goodharts-law

If a metric becomes a target, It ceases to be a good measure. If it ceases to be a good measure, It will want a glass of milk. If it wants a glass of milk, It will want a cookie. If it wants a cookie, It will need to become a target. If it needs to become a target, It will want to be a measure.

At least once more.

Our company did something similar, but you could bring your own (like a Fitbit) and it would sync its data from Fitbit. The thing it didn’t check was the type of data it was getting. The Fitbit app allowed you to manually enter data, not just data it captured from the device. So this got sync’d to the company app as if it was actual data since it didn’t mark it any differently.

I would sit in bed at night and enter a random feasible number every time to hit my goals and get a cut of those sweet rewards.

That's a good idea. An alternative is to put it on your masturbating wrist, and rub one out. That's got to go a long ways to the daily count. Probably works better for men than women.

I knew someone who put it on their happy dog's tail, and he wagged his way to 10K steps.

Or, to put it succinctly, that which gets measured gets done, and the people in charge of measuring don't know what's important.

This hits so hard

I mean just shit on the floor, they'll get the message real quick. Just doin my job, efficiency is wet fart key to success!

I'd have called an employment lawyer. That can easily be discrimination for some medical conditions like crohns or IBS.

What the fuck? Who has enough money/time in this world to keep tabs on toilet passage?

The neat thing is you don't even need AI for that!

Reminds me of an old story where a pizza place held a competition among the employees, to see which cashier could convince the most people to upgrade their medium pizzas to a large. The POS system was set to track whenever a medium was upgraded, and would award the cashier one point. The employee with the most points each week won something like free movie tickets.

Employees would put on their best salesmen pitches, trying to get customers to upgrade their medium orders to larges. But one cashier always won, pretty much without exception. He was going to see a new movie every week for free. And he didn’t even seem to be trying.

His trick was that whenever a customer ordered a large, he would just put it in as a medium and then immediately upgrade it. It gave him the point for the upgrade, with zero actual sales effort on his part. So every time he had a customer order a large, he got a point by default. Customer ordered three large pizzas? Three points. He didn’t even bother trying to convince people to upgrade their pizza sizes, because the free points from every large order were already enough to let him win every week.

Time to start with one PR per line of code…

A steadfast replacement of engineers in leadership with MBA’s over the last decade plus.

Money found a place in the tech chain and has since ruined it.

I don’t get it. Are they rewarding people for using it more? It’s not really a tool to reward over using more or less. Just seems strange.

The further you get from the front lines the less you have a grasp on day to day operations, especially when the job changes. Double that for leaders that never held technical positions, and come from other areas that guide their view on things.

Then you have the power imbalance with a hierarchy, if someone is responsible for your job you are more likely to just say "yes" to bad ideas than push back on them. Even when a manager is receptive to feedback that doesn't mean the ICs are going to give the feedback, or they get demoralized when their ideas aren't taken for valid reasons.

Execs and management lie at every town hall but then act appaled if someone lies on their resume.