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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

A good thought exercise is to ask yourself, "Is it possible an engineer achieves every OKR yet is the worst employee at the organization?" and "Is it possible an employee achieves NO okr and is the best?"

I feel I could think of examples. There are so many dimensions of valuable work (no security holes, being nice, not reinventing the wheel, documenting well, long-term stability/refactorability, code being reusable by other teams) but I imagine OKRs can't cover all those facets.

It almost seems as fruitless as trying to measure friendship by OKRs.

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For this reason, Spotify now uses OKRs for teams and not people:

https://hrblog.spotify.com/2016/08/15/our-beliefs/

Where I work right now. They use OKR on division level.

At Time Out, we used to set OKRs at team level, and then prompty discard them and the carefully constructed plans that went nowhere when faced with the reality.

So now we're setting the Objectives, and measure the KPIs that are defined to reflect the objectives. The actual means to move the KPI, which would be the KR (key results) in OKRs, are no longer defined in quarterly planning sessions, but are selected and updated by the team during sprint planning.

This gives the teams a large independence in What they are doing while still maintaining business alignment and meaningful measurements.

From what I understand, that is the idea. KRs are the KPIs you are going to focus on each quarter.

Both are possible, yep. But OKRs tend to be written down pretty often (quarterly is what I've seen, but maybe monthly is a thing too). If a bad employee is cruising or a great employee's work is not being recognized quarter after quarter, that's a direct managerial problem and not really what OKRs are trying to solve.

> If a bad employee is cruising or a great employee's work is not being recognized quarter after quarter, that's a direct managerial problem

management introduce OKRs so that they don't have to solve actual managerial problems - the OKRs _are_ their solution! That it misses a bad employee cruising, or a great employee's contribution is a footnote. After all, when the system is using an OKR to guide the actions of employees, and you go against it, it's basically career suicide.

I personally don't like OKRs or any performance metric that isn't directly tied to customers' actions (e.g., growing customer numbers, or growing revenue etc).

Which is why okrs are untied from promos at Google for instance (in theory that is =))

Well most people don't set personal okrs, or at least not formally, so it's probably true that theory matches practice.

why don't you give examples

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