I was just starting out in my career and was more pre-occupied with the task at hand to have enough mental headspace to contemplate the full picture of what was happening. The system itself was designed by traditional software means: trial and error, trying to see what worked and didn’t, usually trying to maximize some KPI at the company. There was also the thought that punishment and reward should be applied fairly and be “data driven”; take the bias and human factor out of decisions and implement performance management in a predicable, deterministic and transparent way.

The problems arose when people realized that the same controls and abilities to instill this equity and “fairness” provided the platform to enable wide scale exploitation in the other direction. Want more profit? Change a variable that was a single number whose action would cause great stress for many people, but would produce a desired result. The goals and metrics would always start out resonable but eventually would cross a certain point, and once they did, there was no going back to the way things were.

Draw your own conclusions to the similarities in this system to our modern day technical web triumphs.