Comment by NalNezumi
1 month ago
Glad to hear that Tim stayed and author managed to steer the entire process towards the right direction. Which requires a listening manager.
I experienced the "bad ending" of this productivity metric trickle down: OKR. This startup wanted not just team-based 3-month review Objective Key Result but also individual one, and on top of it, tied stock option to OKR. It was a robotics startup so very cross-domain teams (Software, Hardware, Embedded, DevOps, HW design, HW testing, HW maintenance etc etc).
The result? Developers became lonely islands. There were no "Tim" anymore. When I (Software Integrator) encountered an issue, that I just couldn't figure out but had a hunch it must be a deep-rooted issue, went to the expert (control/kinematics) for feedback. The answer I got was "I'm sorry I really want to help you but my OKR deadline is very close, and I simply don't have time". He could've probably fixed it in a day or less, but it ended up taking 2 weeks.
The problem turned out to be quite deep: inside layer upon layer of C++ mega monorepo, I found that boost library and a custom kinematics library had implicit struct copy and the different libraries (more than two) used different order for representing translation & rotation (xyz, rpy, Euler, Quaternion) and all of the ordering of each components were different. Somehow over 2 years of operation nobody got troubled by this until our new team had to use it.
Afaik I reported it to the Software team, but again, because OKR, nothing was done about it.
I think just because this startup botched OKRs they still make a lot of sense.
Intel and Google apparently relied on them heavily in their formative years. But:
- they should be cascading (so conflicting OKRs between departments should not happen)
- you should never, ever tie them to individual performance results/compensation/rewards
My sense was OKRs came later for both Intel and Google. Do you know around what year/size they started?
I worked with some ex-Google person who tried to get us to use OKRs. That totally didn't work. Larger company.
Like many things I don't think they're necessarily a bad idea it's just that good ideas always lose to culture. With the right culture/leadership it's not the process that matters. I.e. OKRs aren't going to fix an organization that isn't aligned and conversely there are infinite other ways to align an organization with the right culture and leadership. So in practice, like other things, it just ends up making things worse because it's never a real fix.
Google started using okrs at under 50 people because one of the board members was intel veteran. Not sure about the early years since i wasn’t there for that regrettably but in 2011 when i joined my impression of okr process was that it’s complete and utter bs and giant waste of everyone’s time. iirc google+ hit their okrs swimmingly…
100% this. Want to sacrifice team output? Have team members be concerned about individual goals. Team alignment and synchronization will be off affecting the efficiency and effectiveness of that team's performance.