Hot take: The algorithm that picks who gets promoted at my job feels off
Talked to a coworker who got passed over, and she thinks it only looks at numbers like emails sent, not real work done. It's making people game the system instead of focusing on good projects.
Read this article last week about a call center that only tracked calls per hour. Workers stopped solving problems and just rushed people off the phone to hit their number. It totally broke the service. Same thing happens when they only count emails or code commits. You end up with a ton of empty activity that looks good on a chart but wrecks the actual work. People start competing instead of helping each other.
Our old system was so bad it made me compete with my own team for the dumbest metrics. Felt like I was being graded on how fast I could click, not on actual work.