mydude

The more time I spend working at FAANG, the more I think there's no grand conspiracy to keep us from competing, it's just bad incentives all around.

Want to get promoted as an engineer? Work on something BIG (even if no one asked for it). Want to get promoted as a manager? Get more people on your team (even if you don't need them). Want to get promoted as VP? Better re-org everything so people know you exist (even if re-orgs happen every year). And this problem gets compounded by the fact that the people who are best at playing this game end up making decisions that impact everyone else.

I often wonder if something can be done about this, or is it like a natural law when it comes to big corporations.

If only we had metrics to solve this!

At <FAANG mega-corp>, I used to work on an internal team which basically did nothing important, certainly nothing users ever think about.

The problem that we were trying to solve, well, we had already solved it about 3 years ago, yet the team was still expanding, and our product managers kept spitting out new (mostly useless) project ideas.

One of the main areas of focus was metrics. Leadership was obsessed with metrics, we measured everything. Not just plain empirical metrics (like # clicks), but also very complex metrics, theoretical models that we had data scientists work on, etc. At some point maybe 25% of the team worked on metrics related stuff, it was crazy.

Why were they doing this? Was it only to keep us busy, so that the team can continue to grow? Or maybe they were desperately trying to find metrics by which they could prove the team was actually still doing meaningful work? I don't know.

At some point I left, and moved on to a much smaller team. This team was working on a brand new product, one that customers actually pay money for!

One of the first things I said to my new product manager was "so, what metrics do you care about? how do you measure success?".

He was taken aback by my question. He seemed genuinely perplexed. He paused for a few seconds, then said "metrics? What do you mean by 'metrics'? I look at revenue, when the line goes up I'm happy".

I thought it was... insightful.