Ryan Peterman

Wait, I was like, your win is so close to the border between you did nothing and won that literally like mild tweaks in our code have turned it off.

I was like, I feel like that's not a win people would be so concerned about, and especially this notion that, like, you're almost significant, so therefore you failed, or you're just barely not significant, you know, you win or fail.

That, I think, is a super dangerous culture.

I mean, one of the worst things I ever saw was a team that I managed to squeeze, and one of the things they told me was they're like, hey, you know, we have to do this thing because we made a goal.

And I was like, okay, but what are you going to do in the next half?

So they're like, oh, definitely, July 2nd, we're going to delete this code.

And I was like, wait, then why are we shipping it?

Well, because we can't miss our goals.

And I was like, I feel like our goals should not be written in a way where shipping a thing we intend to delete literally a day later is a success.

And they're like, yeah, that's fair.

And I was like, what do you mean fair?

Come on, man, don't do this.

And eventually I convinced them not to do it.

I was like, I'm the manager.

I can decide the ratings.

We don't have to just do this.

But people really firmly believe this.

And I think the statistics thing, the problem is like,

A lack of understanding of statistics bleeds into other weird pathologies of how people are evaluated.

And the two together become like extra dangerous.