How we Hit the Target but Miss the Point

 Elon Musk reportedly fired a wave of engineers, ranked by lines of code written. The least prolific? Gone. Just like me, every developer reading this probably had the same reaction: that's not how any of this works.

But it's also not surprising. It's a textbook case of Goodhart's Law.


"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

 — Charles Goodhart, economist

 

.

The Cobra Story (stick with me):


Colonial Delhi had a cobra problem. The government's fix: pay a bounty for every dead snake brought in. Logical, right?

Locals started breeding cobras to collect the reward. When the government caught on and cancelled the program, the breeders released their now-worthless snakes into the streets. There were more cobras than before.

The metric was dead snakes. The goal was fewer snakes. The moment the metric became the target, people stopped caring about the goal.

It's everywhere, once you see it:

Marketing:

Target: clicks

→ You get clickbait. Users arrive, trust leaves.

Education:

Target: test scores

→ Students memorize. Can't solve real problems.

Engineering:

Target: lines of code

→ Verbose, bloated, unfireable code.


A metric is just a proxy for reality — it's the map, not the territory. The moment we forget that, we start optimising for the map and ignoring the actual terrain.


So What Do We Do?


We can't ditch metrics entirely — we need to know if things are moving. But one number is almost always lying to you. The fix is triangulation: never trust a single measure. Measure productivity? Also track rework time. Measuring engagement? Also, check user sentiment. See you guys in the next blog

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