> Upper management has effectively replaced real, meaningful work with a game where everybody tries to score points, and the people who don't participate in that game are eventually stackranked out of the company.
This. Got managed out of a previous employer as I didn't want to participate in the numbers game by focusing on the customer.
If you are senior enough, you can get away with it for a long time. Customers liked me, account managers too (as their customers increased spending), and my manager (at the director level) had my back. That was all good until the day they put another management layer between the director and me...
i worked at a FAANG co and managed to make it 3 years focusing on solving problems that widely bothered users. there were several instances where i had to -fight- to ship critical bug fixes because the fixes so-happened to regress an obscure metric someone was baby-sitting…
the first time this happened, i felt like my brain was going to explode -- so wait, you want me to leave the main app feed broken and people pissed off because the comment-notes-experience-home-ex team's weekly comment rate is slightly regressing?
writing this out, not sure how i lasted as long as i did.
This reminds me of when we introduced Yammer at a company. Initially, it worked great, everybody loved it, it was super valuable to share information internally. Then, at some point, the feed broke and it somehow started demoting the most valuable posts, requiring much more time to be sure that you had caught up on everything relevant to you.
Then I read an interview with the CEO where he bragged how they were data-driven and were optimizing for engagement. My guess is that somebody had figured out that hiding important information created more "engagement" because people now had to spend more time searching for the stuff that was relevant to them.
This person probably got a promotion, and we switched to a different system half a year later.
Yes, exactly -- the fixation on "metrics-driven development" created perverse incentives (i.e. cobra effect). People would ship bugs and broken shit because it'd bump engagement, like you're referencing; nevermind the fact that the engagement win was because people were clearly flummoxed by a meaningfully worse user experience and it took them longer to do shit. I saw this happen many times, gaming metrics by doing backwards things would definitely get rewarded.
Although what happened was slightly different. I was a developer. Came in fresh faced and worked my ass off. Took on additional work, went to copious amounts of conferences, networked outside of team constantly, always finished my Sprint work ahead of time. Did everything a high performing dev would do. On a scale of 1-5, I was ranked a 3 (meeting expectations), barely any bonus, barely any salary increase.
I was like, "WTF?!?!" and was naturally pretty pissed. Next year? Barely did anything. Came into the office for morning standup, left, worked from home rest of the day. I constantly took afternoons off, Still got work done on time, did the absolute minimal amount of work. I was "silently quitting" before anybody ever coined the phrase. Next years review? Yeap, you guessed it, another 3.
That pretty much confirmed to me that nothing was ever going to change if I was working my ass off or just doing the absolute minimal amount of work. This lasted another two years before they finally offshored my team and I left the company with several great references.
It was a great lesson to learn that its just a game, and you either do everything to stand out which has a high mental and emotional cost, or you simply refuse to play the game, retain your sanity, and look at your job as simply a means to an end as opposed to a satisfying career.
This. Got managed out of a previous employer as I didn't want to participate in the numbers game by focusing on the customer.
If you are senior enough, you can get away with it for a long time. Customers liked me, account managers too (as their customers increased spending), and my manager (at the director level) had my back. That was all good until the day they put another management layer between the director and me...