8 ms·
That quote mostly applies to human organizations where the connection between outcome and metric is questionable. Or where incentives unexpectedly change behavi
by groundzeros2015 19d ago
That quote mostly applies to human organizations where the connection between outcome and metric is questionable. Or where incentives unexpectedly change behavior.
If your goal is fast software it can be measured quantively and you’re likely to improve the actual thing using those metrics.
- socalgal2 19d agoThe goal above was to write fast software. The developers made the mistake of seeing that they had saturated all the cores as "We did a good job of using the entire machine" = "our code is fast". They had a measurement and misinterpreted what it meant.
- groundzeros2015 18d agoThis is just dumb. You wanted to improve performance but measured memory instead? Whoops. Why not measure performance for which there are many good metrics.
- socalgal2 18d agoThey didn't measure memory, they measured how busy each processing unit was. It's like going into Activity Monitor, Tops, Task Manager, seeing all CPUs at 100% from your app and thinking "We've reach peak perf by utilizing all the processing power" People still do that today. They run some LLM or gen AI type app. See all the numbers reach high percentages, and wrongly think "this app is using all of my machine's potential"
- groundzeros2015 17d agoYes it was an analogy about measuring two unrelated things.