If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/
I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.
Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.
The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy
If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/
I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.
Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.
1 - https://archive.org/details/programmingprodu0000jone/page/n1...
And then there was Bill Atkinson.
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy
> cross-tribe hands trading
sounds like they had some cross cutting concerns
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Belgians had nothing to do with that, nor the then governement
The king had a side biz
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While it is good story for illustrating perverse incentives, there is no good historical evidence that the cobra bounty program actually existed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
>This article is about statistics and government policy. For Nazi analogies in internet discussions, see Godwin's law.
I have seen similar at my company so it is highly plausible.
I call unintended consequences on this KPI culture
They polished the turd more than stating, but the bones are real.
I don’t.
Things that rhyme with this have indeed been happening at the biggest names.
I call AI on this comment
why?
Imitating your own utter lack of explanation or evidence?
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