Something I found annoying at a previous big-tech work, was how the focus on top-level metrics …
Something I found annoying at a previous big-tech work, was how the focus on top-level metrics (read, revenue-linked metrics) meant we couldn't fix things. There were a lot of smart people, very interested in fixing things— not only because engineers tend to like fixing things, but also because we, and everyone around us, were users too. For example, many things related to text input were broken on the site. Korean was apparently quite unusable. I wanted to fix it. A Korean manager in a core web team wanted to fix it. But we couldn't because the incentive structures dictated we should focus on other things. It was only after a couple years, and developing a metric that linked text-input work with top-level (read, revenue-linked) metrics, that we were able to work on fixing these issues. I find a lot of value in the effort to make incentives objective, but at a company that was already worth half a trillion dollars at the time, I just always felt there could be more room for caring about users and the product beyond the effects on the bottom-line.
Original discussionApple needs a Snow Sequoia780 source comments · at import