My previous employer incentivized employees through quarterly bonuses which were tied to quarterly goals. The completion of these goals was assessed via measurements: if you accomplished 80% of your quarterly measurements you'd receive 80% of your target bonus, etc.
The company naively neglected to account for the little lawyer that wakes up in many of us when it comes to our income. It so happened that people paid much more attention to the measurements than to the goals. Logical, isn't it? After all, it was the measurements, not the goals, that determined the size of the bonus.
And so, just before the release of a critical product, we had the fortune of being visited by elves. We had a quarterly goal to GA that product, and one of the measurements was to have no more than 25 high-severity bugs. Alas before that night the number of such bugs was stubbornly higher. Luckily the elves realized the seriousness of the situation, came to our rescue, and downgraded 12 of the bugs to medium-severity overnight.
An even better story is that of another major product which formally GAed on time, though it was not available for customer shipments for several more months.
Be careful with the manner in which you measure people. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is noticeable at a scale much larger than that of quantum particles.
Zzzzz...
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