I was glad to see Dave validate something I said earlier, ie, that the purpose can't be divorced from the calibration. Some had argued that was wrong and I don't think this conversation goes anywhere if too many participants don't get why it really is important.

Regardless of how we may each choose to look at it, karma is a currency and there will always be those wanting to spend it somehow.

Not sure if this next anecdote will be helpful but this discussion put me in mind of a dilemma we had when I worked for TI. We were doing a lot of drawing rework and managers wanted to quantify the effort in order to gauge who did the most work. Starting off on a competitive basis caused the quantification brainstorming to get ugly fast-- we were going to be pitted against each other so every person wanted his/her pet metric to be the ultimate measurement. I preferred to work on big projects for instance and a colleague preferred quick and dirty stuff.

The discussion quickly polarized into 2 camps along those lines. One camp wanted every single change item as the core metric; the other wanted only pages of the change order. The simplicity of the latter appealed to our simple-minded manager but the ugliness of it turned off the project-minded in the group. There were often times a change order would have one page and one line: "completely redraw this multipage manual document in CAD".

The group leader (not manager) and I saw this was going nowhere so we brainstormed on our own. We realized the solution was absurdly simple: every drawing was divided into a number of marked zones, and regardless of the document size the zone sizes were the same. We realized that "zones affected" was a very reasonable middle ground, easy to measure and fair to all including those doing the hardest work. This was important since the metrics would drive performance reviews (the karmic "reward").

But our simple-minded manager and those who cherry-picked the easy work overruled the idea and we went with the per-page metric against some protests. A rule was put in place to pull work from the top of the stack with the hope that it would even out over time (I later proved statistically that this could not occur within the expected time frame).

Fast-forward to several weeks later. Certain individuals started coming in early in order to raid the work queue. They only drew out drawings with very simple changes and cranked through them. Others of us were assigned to specific projects which meant extensive work (ironically, the better employees were always picked for projects). Based on our metrics, we did "less" work though.

In no time the metrics were heavily skewed toward the cherry-pickers. Things started getting ugly, a lot of sabotage and backstabbing. Our useless manager thought reminding us of policy and posting a pointless note at the queue would solve the problem. Nope.

Review time was a disaster. Even our clueless manager realized his solution didn't work, because he knew some had worked on complex projects. He also noted that the peer-review portion exhibited a high degree of petty backstabbing toward the cherry-pickers.

Our division was sold off before this was ever resolved so there was no real ending.

Again I don't know if that story helps this discussion, but at the very least it should point out the pitfalls of a bad karmic system... hence the value of diverse, objective discussion. The only bad ideas are the ones that wantonly screw people over.