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Flow Manifest(o)

flowmanifest.org

31–36 of 36 posts

Re: Flow Manifest(o)

#31
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culture eats processes for lunch. It is incredibly frustrating to join a new team, point out the very obvious misalignment between agile and what they are doing... and then become assimilated and just march on becoming part of that same culture.

Unless you've been hired specifically to address a culture problem and been given the resources and powers with which to do so, don't be that guy. All the people who are in your immediate vicinity already know about the problems and they don't have the power to change it either.

That's an example of learned helplessness, it's very sad when it happens. No reason to encourage people to give into it, though.

Re: Flow Manifest(o)

#32

Great site, but unfortunate to have mixed satire and non-satire ( https://flowmanifest.org/we-believe/ ) in the same site Btw HNers - any here disagree with the 'We believe' page?

I think that most manifestos are rhetorical devices, used mainly for opening up discourse.

Re: Flow Manifest(o)

#34
post #23
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. Indeed. This is Goodhart’s Law.

Goodhart's Law is that the metric becomes an invalid measure. What I find interesting is the stronger claim, that performance on the thing you were actually trying to encourage will go down.

Invalidating the metric after it becomes a target means that the metric is no longer an indicator of performance, so you have no guarantees that an increase in the metric results in an increase in performance.

Re: Flow Manifest(o)

#35
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goodhart's Law is that the metric becomes an invalid measure. What I find interesting is the stronger claim, that performance on the thing you were actually trying to encourage will go down.

Invalidating the metric after it becomes a target means that the metric is no longer an indicator of performance, so you have no guarantees that an increase in the metric results in an increase in performance.

In some ways I think it follows trivially from the law: energy has been redirected away from the-thing-you-want and towards the-thing-you-measure.

Unless you think effort spent on the metric increases the total energy of the system, anyway. Personally I would bet it pretty much always decreases it, not even breaking even.

Re: Flow Manifest(o)

#36
post #10
post #5

I enjoy these parodies very much, but on a deeper level, we need a good analysis of why this keeps happening. We've had many movements that have aimed for simplicity and commonsense and ended up a bureaucratic nightmare. Is there a way to actually achieve simplicity and commonsense?

Reward individuals for getting things done. Not itself an easy task, but as long as everyone makes roughly the same salary... and as long as those jobs are gated in the first place by credentials and ridiculous interviews... Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems…

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