I don’t think this is just about status. There’s also issues around choosing the metric and Goodhearting. I work in software development, and it would be really nice if we could just measure a single thing and know how effective engineers are, but every metric we’ve thought of is easy to game. You could say you plan to start measuring lines of code written and won’t use it in performance reviews, but the only sane thing for an engineer to do would be to start gaming the metric immediately since lines-of-code is correlated with performance and how long will management resist the temptation use the metric?
It seems like academia has a similar problem, where publications are measurable and gameable, and if we could somehow stop measuring publications it would make the field better.
I actually thought Richard’s post was a joke until I read this. I’m impressed.