Comment by gtowey

What a wonderful scapegoat! Technically it's all "engineer created" because the managers generally don't do technical work. I bet many managers pushed their reports to increase their usage during their 1:1 meetings based on data from the leaderboard. If management had any sense that it was a bad metric, they had ample time to get ahead of it and take it down and provide appropriate guidance. Instead, predictably, they waited until it was a full on disaster and a crisis before acting.