
Ask HN: Companies that don’t have OKRs? - okrthrowaway
Ever since my company switched to using OKRs a couple years ago I’ve been way more stressed and don’t enjoy work like I used to. We’re only around a 1300 person large org. I mention this because I also wonder if working in larger companies is not for me?<p>Deadlines seem arbitrarily created and there’s less incentive for teams to help each other out if it’s not strictly an OKR.<p>I’m a dev, anyone enjoying their working lives elsewhere and not bound by OKRs? This is started to impact my mental health.
======
raffraffraff
I understand why they're implemented, but IMHO they don't work. I don't even
think that sprint planning works very well for certain functions. Even in a
modern tech company with intelligent, motivated, hard-working individuals, its
pure guesswork trying predict how long it'll take to implement some new system
or code some new feature, or guess the length of a piece of string. As soon as
the quarter is planned, suddenly you're committed to delivering your OKRs. I
think that successful tech people tend to be optimic and confident. "Yeah, I
think we could get that done in 2 weeks" people. Sometimes you get lucky, but
more often than not, things are more complex and fucked up than you thought.
The result is either extra work or a missed deadline (which means no bonus,
poor rating or if you're in the US, getting fired). If you work your ass off
and hit the target, that level of effort becomes the new norm. It's expected
by your manager and even by yourself. Impostor syndrome is very real. You
fight to stay afloat and blame yourself for the horrible complexity you keep
running into.

I've worked at two companies that went from startup-mode to corporate mode.
I've never experienced an increase in productivity or job satisfaction after
OKRs were introduced. In fact, it has always been the opposite. Suddenly
you're spending less time in first-person-shooter mode where you're slaying
bugs and making progress, and more time in third-person watching yourself do
your job from a fucking time tracking app.

Want productivity? Get all the people who want to monopolise your time into a
room: product managers, security, incident managers. Let them decide what the
priorities are. Not create 20 tickets that all have 'high priority ', but a
single ordered list. Then you can just work through the list, and keep people
informed about your progress via some stupid-simple ticketing system that
doesn't eat half of your life. Rinse and repeat.

~~~
okrthrowaway
Thank you for responding. I don’t have anything to say except that your
experience has been my own and I’m exhausted.

