Forwarded from HN Best Comments
Re: OKRs Are Bullshit
Reminds me of the time I had an OKR to reduce page load time by some ridiculous amount. The speed wasnโt even bad and there was no theory about how exactly it would help the product. We didnโt sell ads or anything like that.
We ended up achieving our goal by greatly reducing the quality of all images to almost nothing, such that they looked like a rorschach test, and measuring performance on a fast internal network. Management was so happy they bought a white sheet cake and had the graph of improvement drawn on it in icing.
The next quarter, customers started to complain and a new OKR was set to improve image quality by 50%. So we just reverted all the prior changes, and once again victory was declared.
This company operated like this for the entire year I was there. I finally had to quit because I started to question my own sanity. Ever since that experience I have PTSD whenever someone says the word OKR.
iamleppert, 3 hours ago
Reminds me of the time I had an OKR to reduce page load time by some ridiculous amount. The speed wasnโt even bad and there was no theory about how exactly it would help the product. We didnโt sell ads or anything like that.
We ended up achieving our goal by greatly reducing the quality of all images to almost nothing, such that they looked like a rorschach test, and measuring performance on a fast internal network. Management was so happy they bought a white sheet cake and had the graph of improvement drawn on it in icing.
The next quarter, customers started to complain and a new OKR was set to improve image quality by 50%. So we just reverted all the prior changes, and once again victory was declared.
This company operated like this for the entire year I was there. I finally had to quit because I started to question my own sanity. Ever since that experience I have PTSD whenever someone says the word OKR.
iamleppert, 3 hours ago