Great article, very true.<p>"For some reason, corporate legibility tools often have poor UX for those who interact with them who are not administrators."<p>That's because administrators decide which of these tools to use and buy. Tools then focus on pleasing them first. This reminds me of a similar situation with doctors. Some years back there was a great article in the New Yorker called Why Doctors Hate Their Computer. There is a similar dynamic where doctors waste hours on documentation that is then read by hospital administrators who then base their decisions on that. To the administrators this is great, they can see patterns and react to them. To the doctors, not so much.
Legibility also increases the ability for a large organization to chase singular ambitious goals.<p>For example: software estimation is hard. It takes time, it's highly inaccurate (frequently by 2x or more), and rewarding good estimation incentives worse software.<p>But having deadlines helps functions like marketing and sales immensely. Marketing can plan effective launches, and sales can guide customers towards new products with minimal lag in uptake.<p>Lots of corporate life is like this. It's a net good if it's used to deliver a better experience to customers. It's a constant fight to make sure legibility efforts aren't being used to hoard power for personal gain.
Eh, I find this gross.<p>It seems like the premise is "To succeed in bureaucratic companies you must become a bureaucrat".<p>But what I witness is every company that becomes beureacratic dies. And it dies to smaller companies that do more/better with a thousandth the headcount. And I see this natural selection as a good thing.<p>Maybe if your only goal is to be the vulture sucking money out of a terminal dinosaur these are good skills to adapt. But I think it's better to join a place that isn't lost to meaningless metrics and do work that's valuable to the customer and explain it to other humans in human ways (with a reasonable amount of measurement).
" ... as soon something is quantified, power is given to the measurer."<p>Maybe this is what the "agile wars" are all about. To measure the project progress you have agree on how to measure it, and then whoever defines those rules has the power.
That's one of the reasons for agile's<p><i>Working software over comprehensive documentation</i><p>Working software is the common currency, we can all understand what the software looks like when it's working. (If we can't, we have whole different set of problems to solve first).<p>It also avoids the problem Goodhart's law: when what we "measure" is the actual software to be delivered, it remains a good measure.
Good article. A lot of this boils down to: you want to be the author/creator/owner of as many docs as possible. Even docs that are a collaborative effort.
If you have enough business understanding and are interested in the product your company delivers, legibility tools can help you see your personal contributions in context. I think that’s pretty fun. At the least it can lend some more meaning to the daily routine.
Making work legible can be good for the workers as well! Sometimes. Often not. Jira Metrics / LoC can be used to help justify promotions and raises. Or wrongly deny them!
tl;dr: In order to master the state's attempts at legibility, one must embrace the legibility and use it to advance one's own aims.<p>I don't think that's <i>exactly</i> what Scott had in mind, but sure: if you want to equalize manager-worker power imbalances in the workplace, it might be possible to work collaboratively to make legibility-creating metrics more accurate and fair.