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xkcd #2899: Goodhart's Law
(imgs.xkcd.com)
Alt text:
[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.
I’d not heard of this before, but this explains a lot of why my call center jobs were such BS.
We were expected to resolve networking, MS Exchange and VoIP issues in 20 minutes or less on average, which just resulted in a lot more customers having to call back because all the agents had to try and rush to a solution without time to test.
It's wildly under-taught. It explains like half of all problems in the world. Education: "teaching to the test." Economics: optimizing GDP at the expense of non-material well-being. Maximizing shareholder value by selling out employees and enshittifying your product. Software: "data-driven decision making" optimizing short -term gains over long-term because they are more measurable. That's just off the top of my head.
But how else can the corporate bureaucracy hold its grip on people otherwise? The metrics are as necessary as catehism for catholicism.
The corporate bureaucracy is as much a product of the overall system, and just as much a slave to its incentives, as you or I. Though granted, the level of self-awareness of their role in the system is on average pretty low. With few exceptions, there is nobody at the wheel of problems like these. Worrying about whose fault it is is usually a waste of time.