How many followers do you have? How many likes did that post get?
By now, we all know these are just vanity metrics. A gamified system designed to get you to care about numbers. Largely meaningless when you think about them for a bit.
At the end of the day, your follower count doesn’t create value. Having a lot of likes doesn’t make you successful or a good person.
As software engineers, we can fall into the same trap with vanity metrics.
- Lines of code written
- Page views
- Milliseconds shaved off a response time
- Story points completed
- Hours spent on a project
There’s a temptation to quantify something & then pursue the number.
It happens to engineers all the time. Commonly, it happens to entire engineering teams. Doggedly pursuing some metric.
However, the metric doesn’t always create value. It sounds nice, but doesn’t make sense to pursue.