[HN Gopher] Plato's Dashboards
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Plato's Dashboards
Author : e_proxus
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-12-22 17:09 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| phillipcarter wrote:
| I don't have much to add other than this reminds me of the
| obsession around "satisfaction" for product metrics and why that
| seems to always boil down to slapping NPS on it because it's a
| number and execs like numbers.
|
| I think this is essential reading if anyone's interested on a
| product-focused tangent for the topic:
| https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmf...
| splittingTimes wrote:
| Sorry to ask but What's NPS?
| cconstantine wrote:
| Net Promoter Score:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
|
| How likely are people to promote the thing?
| hinkley wrote:
| > So let's circle back to metrics and ways to ensure we use them
| for guidance rather than obey them reflexively.
|
| I'm not sure this is the right framing of the problem. "Guidance"
| is too nebulous and leaves us with the same problem of
| interpretation. Advice from an old tracker: You
| want to find someone, use your eyes.
|
| When I have someone who is getting themselves/us in trouble by
| looking at charts, my remedy always includes the notion that
| charts are for asking questions, not answering them. You might
| have a chart that says user response time has improved, but have
| you tried using the service from your phone (with wifi disabled)?
| If the chart says the times are shifting, we need to know why
| they are shifting, because that's information. "Looks like
| response time went down," is only useful as the introduction to a
| question, like, "did we change something?" or "did we have a
| routing issue?", or "can we do the same thing on this other
| service that is drawing complaints?"
|
| Getting good questions also often involves cleaning up sources of
| noise in the charts. It's too easy for someone with an axe to
| grind to jump to conclusions that this is a repeat of a problem
| we had before (ie, this is Team X's fault... again) or that lack
| of improvement means failure to act. It is not impossible that I
| fix one regression at the same time someone else causes another,
| or changes the denominator by the same magnitude as the fix.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| I'll barge in and say that there's this meme in business schools
| that: "what gets measured, gets done."
|
| They're mostly there to serve as the source of truth, whether or
| not a specific manager is getting a bonus (and by how much).
|
| Generally, the best metrics are "based in reality" (and usually
| revolve around inflow and outflow of money) -- but those are hard
| to fudge, without playing accounting games, and even harder to
| meet (it takes actual skill, rather than being able to pass the
| buck endlessly for a couple of years, before moving onto another
| org); so you may find it common for the managerial horde to pick
| "bullshit metrics" to cover their own asses (doubly so, if the
| metrics are decided by committee).
|
| There's no reason for practical metrics to exist in most large
| corporations -- the incentives just aren't aligned. Bonuses are
| decided by metrics (and anyone who has a modicum of intuition,
| will always pick the metric that can be most gamed for himself,
| and his underlings). Also, if we're being real with ourselves,
| there's very little that managers "control," so picking a "real"
| metric would just breed an environment that selects for luck (or
| lies).
|
| In my opinion, the only useful metric is profit generated.
| Everything else is just an emotional safety blanket for
| uncertainty.
| cconstantine wrote:
| The only thing that matters is revenue, and if it can't be
| easily measured against revenue it doesn't exist. I am so tired
| of this line of reasoning. It's poisoning the industry, ruining
| products, and sucking the joy out of work.
|
| What about making a quality product because you have a passion
| for it? Nope, make a broken MVP and move on to the next
| customer.
|
| If I can't maintain a metric until I can tie it to revenue,
| then I guess I don't get cpu usage on our database. Or disk
| usage. Or response time for anything that only employees touch.
| Bad data and errors are fine as long as no one complains.
| Actually, if we produce a shitty product long enough everyone
| will get used to it and stop complaining. If we stop measuring
| error rates we can stop wasting time on fixing things right?
| Tests and code refactors just get in the way of delivering that
| MVP. Rewards are doled out for fixing an outage, and preventing
| them is a cost-center to be eliminated.
|
| On the flip side, now we've got KPIs for our ability to push
| things through the corporate bureaucracy. I didn't become a
| programmer so I can waste time estimating how long it'll take
| to produce a design doc that'll be useless by the time I get to
| implementation, just so a bureaucrat can decide if some deeply
| technical problem they don't understand should be fixed.
|
| There has to be a better way.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| Commerce is a vulgar endeavor.
|
| Whatever nobility or higher morality finds within it, it's
| just an exception that slipped through the cracks.
|
| Idealism towards the external world will always be met with
| defeat (you simply do not have the power to fight more than
| one battle, with one person).
|
| The only thing left is to serve as a role model, standing
| tall and never wavering, for your values and ideals---so that
| those around you may follow in your footsteps, if they so
| wish.
|
| Perhaps you could start by refusing to play the KPI game?
| What is anyone really going to do, besides through vacuous
| diatribes about being a "team player," and such nonsense. The
| only power these corporate constructs have is that which is
| surrendered to it.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > In my opinion, the only useful metric is profit generated.
| Everything else is just an emotional safety blanket for
| uncertainty.
|
| This too can be a toxic metric. Only focusing on what looks
| good in the quarterly report encourages a type of short-
| sightedness that has been the undoing of many businesses.
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| Yes; it's a trade-off due to how difficult it is to make
| people give a shit about the short-term---forget about the
| long-term (if there's no stock involved. We've barely figured
| out how to make CEOs tuned into the "long-term").
|
| The corp is just a vehicle for the goals of all its
| passengers. Most of them are only on-board for a couple of
| stops, and then off to the next vehicle. To voluntarily forgo
| getting off at your stop, without receiving something of
| equal or greater value, seems awfully foolish.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| The funny thing about the Allegory is that Platonism embraces the
| kind of Idealism that fetishizes ideas; the _idea_ of a thing is
| what is supposed to be ultimately real. According to other
| worldviews though, like Buddhism, this kind of thinking is
| exactly what keeps one tethered to the world as we know it--you
| are supposed to realize that the map is never the territory, not
| to put some kind of idea of The Map on a pedestal!
|
| I think that kind of thinking is exactly like clinging to images
| on the walls.
|
| But what do I know, I haven't studied philosophy. (I know
| nothing!)
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