My Take on Numbers and Nonsense
You see stuff online, right? People throwing numbers around like they mean everything. Sometimes it’s just wild, like someone fixated on a specific number, say, “5 in” something or other. Doesn’t really matter what it is, could be anything. It just reminds me of how fixated people get on numbers that don’t tell the whole story.
I remember this one time, working on a project. Not gonna name names, place is probably gone now anyway. We had this manager, real stickler for metrics. But not useful metrics, oh no. He got obsessed with this one specific target: five. Five what? Five deployments a day. Didn’t matter if they were tiny fixes or huge features. Just five.
So, what did we do? We started breaking everything down into tiny, stupid pieces.
- Changed a button color? That’s one deployment.
- Fixed a typo in a comment? Boom, number two.
- Added a log statement? Three.
- Moved a file? Four.
- Breathed funny near the server? Okay, maybe not that far, but almost. We’d find something small just to hit the magic number five before heading home.
It was insane. We spent more time figuring out how to game the system, how to slice things thin enough to make five “deployments,” than actually doing solid work. The real work, the stuff that needed careful thought and maybe took a whole day or two to get right? That got pushed aside or rushed. Because the only thing that mattered was hitting five.
It felt completely backward. We weren’t building better software; we were just hitting a number. Quality went down, bugs went up, but hey, the manager had his chart showing “five deployments daily.” Looked great on his report, I guess.
That whole experience just soured me on chasing arbitrary numbers. Whether it’s five deployments, or some weird measurement someone got stuck on, it’s usually missing the point. Focus on the real work, the actual quality, not just some number someone pulled out of thin air.
Eventually, I just had enough of that place. Moved on. Found somewhere that cared more about building good stuff than hitting silly targets. Sometimes you just gotta walk away from the nonsense, you know?
