I know right? What did the leadership think would happen when they give some of the worlds greatest software engineers (supportably), a easily quantifiable metric to target?
The leaderboard wasn't leadership generated, it was engineer generated from internally available data. The leadership target is "impact" from ai tools.
Budget impact is technically impact.
What a wonderful scapegoat! Technically it's all "engineer created" because the managers generally don't do technical work. I bet many managers pushed their reports to increase their usage during their 1:1 meetings based on data from the leaderboard. If management had any sense that it was a bad metric, they had ample time to get ahead of it and take it down and provide appropriate guidance. Instead, predictably, they waited until it was a full on disaster and a crisis before acting.
At one point there were over 70 different token maxing dashboards as the management had a game of whack a mole trying to remove them. There definitely was encouragement from management about a year ago to increase ai usage, but once Claude code was allowed, they didn't really need to encourage anyone any more.