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Tom Pendergast's avatar

Just read a book you might like: “The Score” by C. Thi Nguyen. Best thing I’ve read in years and directly relevant here.

Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Just read the synopsis - sounds very much inline with this but am I done playing those games?

Tom Pendergast's avatar

In Nguyen’s eyes, it’s games all the way down. I found the book very compelling despite my complete disaffection with conventional metrics

Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

I can see that. I’ll checkitout. Right now I’m reading pure escapist SciFi and it’s pretty good.

Tom Pendergast's avatar

Well, this definitely isn’t SciFi but it’s not your typical nonfiction either, much more playful

Albert Cory's avatar

I wrote a post about this "negotiation" process. We had manager's training where we had to duke it out with the other managers about our "employees."

Our team failed completely. They got absorbed into finding some "objective" formula to rank people. There is no such thing, of course.

Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Yeah I think you nailed it — objective on the outside, subjective on the inside.

Andrew Smith's avatar

I made baseball cards for us as kids! They were just hand-drawn, but I kept tally of averages and stuff like that, at least for the handful of games we managed to play.

I was playing the mafia game back then.

Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

You knew you were going to be The Don.

Jennifer Houle's avatar

I loved this post, so good! And yeah, calibration time is something else, that’s for sure.

Andrew Sniderman 🕷️'s avatar

Tx for reading Jennifer! I was talking to one of my old friends from MSFT about how the system runs on perpetual losers and an annual cycle of disruption. My team was strong, yet every year I had to pick losers. I wouldn’t, so every year it was a fight.