xahteiwi.eu – Meaningless Metrics, Treacherous Targets
Posted by jpluimers on 2022/12/15
Food for thought:
[Wayback] xahteiwi.eu – Meaningless Metrics, Treacherous Targets
A common feature of organizations in the software technology industry (but certainly not only in that industry) is their fixation on metrics, measurements, and quantifiers. I understand that this is frequently done and advocated for in the spirit of making management more objective, less arbitrary, more scientific, and perhaps fairer. But since they say that the road to hell is often paved with good intentions, here’s a quick summary of what we know about about the undesirable side effects of such an approach.
Basically, when the metric becomes the goal, it will not reliably measure the underlying figures any more.
By [Archive] Florian Haas on Twitter: “I wrote something long-ish on metrics over the weekend. I’m pretty certain this won’t go unchallenged, as people tend to have strong opinions on this. 🙂 “.
Via [Archive] Kristian Köhntopp on Twitter: “In writing this, @xahteiwi had probably done more for the advancement of SRE as a practice than one hundred conference talks could do. Thanks for that.… “.
–jeroen
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