(Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold into buying some wizz-bang widget that we need to now integrate because of a sunk-cost fallacy, but I thought everyone was on the same page that this is not how normal procurement was supposed to work.)
> the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used.
That is way too charitable, people were being fired based on these metrics and people were absolutely talking about token burn as being a metric for productivity (do I really need to link the Jensen Huang quote?). That isn't an indication of this hysteria being based on "just trying to see if the tools work".
If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?
Are you suggesting that changes to new production technologies are always driven bottom up by line workers? I'm guessing that historically that's rare.
because that would require actually admitting that employees are the people in an organisation who are responsible for the success of that organisation, rather than the people higher up the org chart.
maybe, just maybe, it would have been a better idea to engage with employees first rather than posting on linkedin about how everyone is going to lose their jobs.
cos it's the kinds of people trying to force this stuff on employees that are the ones who have been shouting about that from the rooftops.
Though in theory power tools are faster than hand tools.
The mandate was literally “the more sawdust you create the more money you’ll make”. Nothing of value is learned by that mandate. Sure it’ll make people use power tools but it won’t cause anyone to learn how to use them to make furniture.
They might understand the danger of bad metric but that doesn’t mean they aren’t victims of them. If there was intentionality here it was lazy as hell at best.
Or count the fingers, I guess. It's all fun and games until someone looses AI.
They don't. They want some metric to support what they want to do and don't care about good metrics at all.
I've spent the vast majority of my career in FAANGs and it's been the pattern everywhere.
Right now my org has a senior director who is constantly battering managers to tell their reports to fill out the weekly surveys.
Why are the employees not filling out the surveys? Because instead of the old once a year large survey with questions about various levels (including local teams where management cared about the numbers and I could see the actions they took) we now get a survey every week with questions that are meaningless and I have no answer for.
"How does team X deliver on its priorities"?
Team X has O(10K) peoples and a barely countable infinity of projects. Most of which I don't know about and most of which I'm not supposed to know about since things are compartmentalized. So I don't know what team X's priorities are, I don't know how they deliver on them, and I never will know. Asking me and my colleagues is a waste of time and money.
...but none of that matters because the directors want "data" and they want a dashboard showing that we're all giving them "data".
from my time in FAANG... that seems about correct. Probably the people at the absolute top don't want to just pointlessly burn tokens, but pass that down the chain and eventually the rumor mill turns that into "tokens are an input for your performance review" and people start running Wiggum loops to fix minor typos or linters or something—especially if you do it at a time when every company seems to be doing layoffs.
You're far too charitable. Understanding has nothing to do with it. Big companies are too far insulated from bad metrics. Middle managers get away with anything and everything because their decisions are too far removed from reality. And they're nowhere to be seen when the other shoe drops. And they'll just leave to a promotion elsewhere if they stay and results are bad.
Everything is far removed from reality in bigco. So you get a bunch of theater and house-playing with "data-driven" posters up on the wall. It's a show that everyone is aware of and seemingly we all still attend.