The Lesson to Unlearn

Not sure that's true. Marketing is a hack, for one. If you have the best product but nobody knows about it, it's no use.

More generally, there's a reason that the tech career ladder is hackable: performance reviews are both important and also too expensive to do right. If you want a real evaluation of what I've done over the past year, what you really need is someone following me 40 hours a week, noting how I contributed (positively or negatively) at small meetings, keeping track of whether my projects are late because I helped someone with something truly important or I spent my time on HN, etc. But you can't assign one reviewer per employee, so you make an approximate process where employees self-report what they did and managers report the fraction they've seen. You also can't get rid of the process, because a simple profit motive demands you incentivize employees for actually delivering business value. So you have a process that's vulnerable to exploits like flashy launches that will wither in a year.

If you as a business owner aren't evaluating your employees, you won't be profitable. If you're watching each moment of your employees, you're wasting time. If you spend your time developing a fairer review process, you're not working on your actual business. If you don't hire employees and just put yourself out there in the market, your customers certainly aren't evaluating you fairly. (And of course your employees and potential hires are evaluating you on partial data, and it's in your interest to hire and retain good employees.) So whatever you do, it's hackable, and if you don't play the game you'll forfeit it.

FWIW the UK Education Act actually enshrines this concept (parents are responsible for a child being educated), though this has been eroded considerably by Tory policy in the last decade or so. We did tell our primary school "don't expect homework from $child[0]" one year, they didn't complain. However we also wanted to do flexschooling and the head refused it, which I'm still smarting over and consider to have been a significant detriment.

That same primary school ditched regular style homework in favour of projects, which $child[1] wants to do, and we can decide easily to curtail the time used doing it if we want. It's a great way of doing homework IMO; very child-centric.

Ha! We use robocopy at work because IT refuses to fix our internal network. We can reliably reproduce an NFS mount dropping off the network around the 12th GB of a large file and the only answer is "stop bugging us and use robocopy". All it does is turn a 30-40 minute process into a 3-4 hour process.