alt Hacker NewsI saw a presentation awhile back which included the slide (roughly):
"Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it."
As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.
Replies
boltzmann-brain • today at 2:56 PM
That's a dramatic but fitting characterization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.