Problem is that “the same” isn’t good enough. To get a promotion, you’d need to somehow prove that your specific change was so good that more customers are happy now than before.

To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.

It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.

The issue is that so long as you play the "performance" game, you'll run into Goodhart's law:

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

All this data driven BS about impact is really just that. So much of it is just gaming the system.