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socalgal2today at 2:30 PM1 replyview on HN

> Measure. Measure. Measure.

The problem is knowing what to measure. There's another saying

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

As an example from memory, there was a game dev company that celebrated they had maxed out the cores on the PS3. That didn't mean anything though, anyone can max out the cores by filing them with bad code. But hey, their "measurement" told them they had maxed out the machine


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tialaramextoday at 2:54 PM

> The problem is knowing what to measure.

This can be a problem, but much less so because so often we're doing "easy mode" where we don't need a proxy. The "it ceases to be a good measure" is because you're measuring a proxy. You wanted to deliver happiness, you measured wealth because it was easier to measure but seemed correlated and now you've got rich miserable people, oops. But software engineers can often measure the actual thing they want to improve directly, not a proxy and so it cannot cease to be a good measure.

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