I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust.

The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used.

I'm sure there were some people cargo-culting this stuff, but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting.

Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world.

(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?

The level of trust in leadership is remarkable. There’s reasonable ways to have people try power tools. Have one team use power tools and another hand tools and see the outcome.

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.

> suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting.

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.

> but suggesting that the people who run FAANG don't understand the dangers of bad metrics is... interesting

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.