The pipeline didn’t record many metrics. The ones it did have made it look like things had gotten worse. My bug discoveries caused the overall bug count to increase. The pipeline’s failures increased because I made it fail fast on anomalies instead of silently passing along bad data. I drastically reduced the time developers spent repairing those failures, but there were no metrics that tracked developer time.
Believe me, I’ve been there — working for organizations which value the wrong things. It’s sort of surprising to see it happen at a place like Google though. Institutionally, it would seem they should better understand the issues with the metrics they collect (or do not collect.)
I spent the early part of my career working for political campaigns, where the only metric that mattered was the number of hours you worked (this is still the case today.) As long as you are on the job 18 hours per day, nobody cares if you are doing your job well or doing it efficiently. If you dared to leave the office before 8pm, you would probably find yourself fired.
I do not miss campaign life.