I remember this article was extremely eye opening for me as a recent grad in 2013 Boston.
I think it's hard for people to understand today how much less the ideas like lean startups, Paul Graham essays, customer validation, etc had penetrated software engineering mindset in early 2010's, at least outside of SFBA.
Leadership and management are crafts just like engineering. Goals and KPIs are tools. Most of the time when I've experienced bad Goals or KPIs, the root problem was one of the following.
1)Lack of clear mission/direction at the top level of the organization. This is a 100% necessary condition for good goals & kpis throughout the rest of the org. Otherwise it feels like political battles and favoritism between different people or departments with conflicting goals.
2) Goals & KPIs that are not well mapped from the org's mission or roadmap down to the individuals. Now all the individuals can hit their goals but org fails, or vice versa.
This feels like "doing what's right for the company is bad for my performance review."
3) Confusing health KPIs with outcomes or goals. Something like commits per day/month is a great health check, but bad goal, and the benchmark for healthy is totally context dependent. This feels like "She solves the hardest problems but the solutions are very few LOC." Or "he has the most commits because his code is so buggy".
It is intended as a cultural and literary reference. As an american english speaker I would say it's a play on the phrase "That dog don't hunt" meaning something will not work. I would consider this to be a 'country' saying not AAVE but I'm not a linguist. More broadly the title mirrors a southern american dialect structure of "[This|that] X don't Y". The article calls it a "Huck Finn style adventure" Huck Finn being the protagonist of famous Mark Twain novels that are famously written with dialogue in AAVE and other southern American dialect.
Here's a 'wrong' but possibly helpful comparison, in the spirit of football fields:
32 billion kilometers is about 100 times the distance a satellite travels from earth to Mars. [1]
That Earth-Mars trip is estimated in the same article to take 4 months, so figure 400 months or 30+ years to shoot another satellite out to reach Voyager 2.
This is ignoring planetary slingshot math, the extra speed to 'catch' voyager 2, and surely lots of other details. Personally I find years and "mars" to be more intuitive in this case than trillions of football fields.
This. Same as software engineers doing production support. It's easy to glorify putting out fires and hard to take credit for careful attention that prevents fires. Preventing fires extends a lot more lives.