Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

(I actually think most stack ranking is dumb, but the comment you made is a very common response and i honestly don't get it)

"This was my first lesson on how focus on tactical goals and metrics can fundamentally screw up the long term vision."

I don't get how you take that away from this - this is a lesson in how bad managers who refuse to do what is asked, and apparently have no accountability, can screw up the system.

Stack ranking may be good or bad, but if your managers are working around the system, and nobody is holding them accountable for it, that's a separate, and honestly bigger, problem.

If they actually did what was really being asked (instead of trying to work around it), either

1. it would work, and the company would be better off.

2. it would fail miserably, and the company would either stop doing that (and be better off) or go bankrupt (and we'd all be better off because it would be an object lesson).

The reason this went badly is precisely because of a lack of real accountability, not because of stack ranking itself.

The point is that if you can game the system, and the system cannot determine that it is being gamed, then it's a bad system.

Who watches the watchmen? In a large-enough organization, the stack ranking system is set by some executive high up the mountain. The low-level line managers and group managers are incentivized to work together to get the budget (for puffer employees) to help them keep their proven performers. Finance doesn't care as long as (a) the bottom-line improvements from firing puffers keep getting realized and (b) management keeps being able to pay puffers below-market salaries. Puffers themselves shouldn't care in this day and age, taking the opportunity to take the puffer paycheck as a 100% remote position with no actual responsibility, while working full-time somewhere else that actually appreciates them, so puffers basically get a free paycheck out of it for nothing.

It doesn't matter if it's a good system in theory. It only matters if it works in practice. There's an old joke about economists - they treat the real world as a special case.

First, the system described by OP is super easy to see who is gaming it. Everyone knows, too!

So it doesn't even fail your first test of "the system can't tell". The system can tell. It's just not doing anything about it. That's the failure i'm describing.

Beyond that: If people work around the system, it will never work, regardless of the system. Any system can be worked around, good or not. There are no magically good systems that can't be worked around, or don't even incentivize people to work around them.

All good systems try to deal with bad actors in some way. If they don't, they fail. Plain and simple.

Saying that any system that doesn't work because it has bad actors is a bad system is silly. You will no-true-scotsman your way into having no systems at all.

I can't tell if you're trolling or not. What's so confusing about rational actors reacting rationally to a change in incentives? Do you think there's only one way for a policy to "fail miserably" or something? Once someone knows that they'll likely have to fire some number of their team whether they want to or not, of course they'll hire sacrificial lambs. It's not like the upper management that has that stupid of a policy is going to give two shits if some middle manager claims they missed their own performance expectations because of instability in their team.

And think about the corollary: how much additional effort would have to go into monitoring managers to make sure they weren't circumventing the "spirit" of the given bullshit metric? A company like that would resemble a dystopian regime.

I'm not trolling at all. As i replied to the other comment, there are zero systems that can't be worked around. There are zero good systems where bad action can be avoided without some form of accountability.

"how much additional effort would have to go into monitoring managers to make sure they weren't circumventing the "spirit" of the given bullshit metric?'

Zero - Everyone already knows when it is bullshit. They all sit in a room, knowing someone else is saying bullshit, but avoid saying anything about it because they want to say bullshit too.

Rational actors do act rationally all the time - the system has to deal with that, and isn't here. That's the point - none of the bad behavior was dealt with.

It's rational to do lots of things. Kill your competitors in the drug game before they kill you, embezzle and rip people off who are vulnerable who can't fight back, etc. Rational is a silly bar, and definitely does not lead to viable systems. It has no moral component. It has no business component. It is only logic.

No system works if it doesn't hold people accountable, even if they are acting rational.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com