MapBrief™

What gets measured gets managed.

I made a pilgrimage to the ruins of the birthplace of “what gets measured gets managed.”

The Midvale Steelworks in North Philadelphia is where Frederick Taylor and his stopwatch laid the foundation for “scientific management” at the turn of the 20th century. Notable too was his assistant there, Henry Gantt, who developed the eponymous project schedule chart. The location stopped producing steel over a half century ago, but the dream of precise productivity measurement continues to haunt our 21st century workplaces.

We in tech never really put away Taylor’s stopwatch, whatever the acknowledgements of its shortcomings when it comes to “knowledge work”. Because management all too often falls back on countable things: hours (preferably billable, or tax deductible), lines of code, pull requests, etc. And we all play along with the kabuki theater of KPIs during performance review season, pretending we all aren’t falling victim to Goodhart’s Law in the meantime.

And now AI has come along and proven very adept at producing countable things–lines of code and pull requests–around the clock(!). And it even spawned its own new countable thing–tokenmaxxing–initially embraced eagerly by management that alas, in record time, fallen victim to its own incentives.

Danger for Those Specializing in the Easily Measurable

Among the recent wave of tech layoffs, consider Cloudflare’s CEO on laying off 20% of its workforce despite profitability:

AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.
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The vast majority of those we laid off last week were measurers. We cut middle managers across the organization because AI allows us to have more direct reports per manager while still measuring and mentoring our teams effectively.

ClickUp CEO Zeb Evans had even more detailed and interesting thoughts about his own company’s 22% cut in headcount:

We must reward people that create productivity accordingly. This aligns incentives on both sides. Plus, in a world where your best people create 100x impact, you can’t afford to lose them.
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Compensation bands of today should be thrown out the door. We’re introducing $1 million cash/year salary bands with a path available to nearly everyone in the company if they produce 100x impact by creating or managing AI systems.

Million-dollar salaries–sign me up! But a quick question here: I’m seeing this phrasing “100x impact”–what, precisely, is “x“?

Triumph of the Qualitative?

If AI has taken over the old metrics–hours worked, lines of code written, et al–how are we humans to be evaluated in the workplace?

The early consensus seems to be centering on “taste” and “judgment“!

Given my experience in technical/engineering teams for over two decades, I can confidently state that our management structures are wholly unprepared to evaluate tech workers on the basis of such qualitative characteristics such as “taste” and “judgment”. I mean, have you ever heard these would-be arbiters of taste discuss their favorite films? Is this really the “x” we’ll dutifully build a new set of KPIs around?

No, my guess is we’re still a far way off from replacing Taylor’s stopwatch because the ‘objectively’ quantitative is the comfort food of our world of zeroes and ones. We will permit its hollow ruins to stand if only as a monument to our own uncertainty of what to replace it with.

— Brian Timoney