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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

> in many cases the true objective for people and/or teams is not something that can be mentioned without being unspeakably impolite

At the individual contributor level the manager is always pushing for “personal OKRs” too

And I’ve never been able to be honest or “authentic” about that

Nobody could ever explain if it was professional development goals, extra responsibility or goals within the company or coding project, or actual personal. Other ICs would be excited to write their actual personal.

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I totally hate that bullshit. The last time I ran into this "personal goal setting" nonsense was at a company where I wasn't planning on staying around very long. You could say it was rather challenging to be authentic.

What kind of goals did you choose, that time?

I just told them what they wanted to hear, like "promoting knowledge sharing through brown bag sessions" with no intention of ever doing it.

Ok :-) I wonder if team/department goals would have been more fun in your case

I was unhappy there after the first month, so any sort of goals would've been pointless. Don't get me wrong, I did decent work and would receive excellent reviews / praise for it, I just didn't like the culture / environment.

The honest truth: I didn't have any goals, and still really don't. I just wanted good, interesting work to do during these dark times (pandemic, etc), with as few interruptions as possible.

It's funny.

When it comes to personal development, side projects, etc. I have had times when I was very interested in setting specific goals and other times when I really didn't want to.

Whenever someone asks that question I tell them my personal goal is to make more money. Ironically this sometimes leads to productive conversations.

This is the dream response for any manager. I am the opposite and cared very little about making more money. I was more interested to reduce my life's operational expenses to get more out of the money I was already making. I got bounced around from manager to manager because of this. Nobody knew how to get me to do anything.

“I want to make more money” is an easy thing for a manager at a not-failing company to handle because it is so concrete and concretely deliverable.

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