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Comment by 12_throw_away

15 hours ago

> dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time

I'm actually a little curious about how long it has been. Bad managers have always prioritized irrelevant metrics, of course, but I have a feeling (backed by no data, just vibes) that management in general crossed a point of no return as soon as "data-driven" became a cross-industry buzzword.

Like, I vaguely remember a time when consumer interactions didn't always come with a request to fill out a survey (with the results getting turned into a number and fed into a dashboard somewhere). And then that changed, and now everything must turned into a number and that number must go up.

"Data driven" essentially means "scalar driven". There is nothing wrong with it if your chosen scalar is a proxy for anything that matters. Of course, usually no one can explain this mapping.