Member-only story

We Started Ranking Engineers by AI Usage. People Got Better at Using AI. Nothing Else Changed.

The adoption dashboard answered who was using the tools. Leadership began reading it as an explanation of who was doing useful work.

Yusuf Seyitoğlu

6 min read9 hours ago

Press enter or click to view image in full size

The engineer at the top of the leaderboard has used the most AI.

That is the only conclusion the leaderboard can establish.

By the second team meeting, people are discussing it as if it establishes several more: who is adapting, who is productive, and who needs to explain why their number is smaller.

Imagine a company introducing an AI adoption dashboard. It begins with a reasonable objective. The business has paid for tools and wants employees to discover useful ways to work with them.

The following team is fictional. Its mistake is to keep expanding the meaning of a measurement while leaving the measurement itself unchanged.

The numbers improve.…