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Comment by booleandilemma | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this too, unfortunately. Commits, PRs, # of stories.

You get silliness from supposed "engineers" who will inflate the points for stories they work on and downplay points for stories others work on. It's pathetic.

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I strongly believe you will get exactly the behavior you incentivize for. I used to apply this mostly to sales people -- if their bonus depends on new business, you will get a large number of soon-to-be-unhappy customers.

It works more generally though ... if management sets a metric, people will try to game it. On the flip side, you can't just have abstract 'quality' or 'customer satisfaction' because it is hard to know if you are really improving. I've never seen this solved once your scale gets past the small-group-of-people-with-a-shared-dream.

Why do people just roll over and accept such bullshit? When have workers become such pussies? A century ago, people risked their lives (and some died) striking to improve working conditions. Today, people just accept management's asinine policies.

Perhaps people are so checked out that they don't care if the policies make any sense at all, as long as they get their paychecks on time.

For me it’s a question of priorities. My salary makes up nearly 80% of my household income. Maintaining financial stability for my family is far, far more important than going on a crusade that might risk my employment.

If your employment and career path are tied to some ridiculous metric, and you (and everyone else) have to game it, that seems more like a systemic failure. It is pathetic that the company has set things up like that. Can’t blame the person for playing the dumb game if it puts food on the table.

It's not like engineers struggle, so playing such games against your colleagues is totally moral failure.

Of course I can.

When our performance reviews (read: raises and promotion) and, sometimes, whether or not we get RIF'd if the company needs to shed workers, depends on us making our metrics look good, you bet your ass we're gonna play the game, even though it's stupid.

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