My very first job out of college was at a law firm with hundreds of paralegals. They were running an in-house workflow system to manage foreclosure and bankruptcy cases. I lucked into a boom industry when the housing bubble burst. At the peak, we were doing over 100K of each a year.
The work was broken down into finely sliced tasks. Paralegals worked out of a queue of tasks, mostly of the same flavor. It was an assembly line for court filings; Taylorism brought to legal work.
Before I started, a new executive had been brought in. One of her jobs was to streamline process. Her plan was simple: she was going to stand behind employees with a stopwatch and time how long it took them to complete tasks. KPIs would be set up based on those measurements.
This went as well as you would expect. People don’t perform tasks the same way they normally do when an executive is standing behind them with a stopwatch. She quickly learned how worthless this was.
All that is a segue to the latest garbage KPI in software engineering, tokenmaxxing, and the AI policy I wrote for my team.
Tokenmaxxing is the latest fad to come out of management who still, in the Year of our Lord 2026, do not understand that every metric will be gamed. That executive with the stopwatch didn’t understand 20+ years ago and there are clearly leaders today who have not received the memo.