Joel has a brilliant post about brainless management method he dubs “Econ 101 Management”. Check it out here.

These two paragraphs sum it up best for me:

When you use Econ 101 management, you’re encouraging developers to game the system.

Suppose you decide to pay a bonus to the developer with the fewest bugs. Now every time a tester tries to report a bug, it becomes a big argument, and usually the developer convinces the tester that it’s not really a bug. Or the tester agrees to report the bug “informally” to the developer before writing it up in the bug tracking system. And now nobody uses the bug tracking system. The bug count goes way down, but the number of bugs stays the same.

[…]

Robert Austin, in his book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, says there are two phases when you introduce new performance metrics. At first, you actually get what you wanted, because nobody has figured out how to cheat. In the second phase, you actually get something worse, as everyone figures out the trick to maximizing the thing that you’re measuring, even at the cost of ruining the company.