I think it's totally fair to see OKRs as silly and useless as an engineer. Personally I think they are really only relevant at the VP level and above.
All the things you say are true about OKRs, they run up against the reality of the business, and at the end of the day are fungible, but I would encourage a different way of looking at OKRs.
They inspire a conversation about how the company should really be spending its time and resources. What are the ultimate goals of what the business is doing. What is the real opportunity. How do we define success and how can we push success further? What's the dream by investing in these various initiatives?
Once you are leading an organization of several people, each of whom has their own individual success depending on some of these decisions, it behooves you to take this type of planning seriously and spend some time trying to answer these questions at some cadence (once or twice a year at least) to solidify the high level goals - even if there is constantly the risk of these OKRs getting trampled by the realities of the business as you eloquently put.
The purpose of having these conversations about OKRs at the leadership level is a bit different than the pragmatic benefits of the agile process and the two are a bit perpendicular in terms of purposes. Agile is on the ground execution, dealing with and greasing the wheels for the day to day efficiency of small teams. OKRs are occasional shocks to the system attempting to steer a large barge on course towards a far off goal.
All the things you say are true about OKRs, they run up against the reality of the business, and at the end of the day are fungible, but I would encourage a different way of looking at OKRs.
They inspire a conversation about how the company should really be spending its time and resources. What are the ultimate goals of what the business is doing. What is the real opportunity. How do we define success and how can we push success further? What's the dream by investing in these various initiatives?
Once you are leading an organization of several people, each of whom has their own individual success depending on some of these decisions, it behooves you to take this type of planning seriously and spend some time trying to answer these questions at some cadence (once or twice a year at least) to solidify the high level goals - even if there is constantly the risk of these OKRs getting trampled by the realities of the business as you eloquently put.
The purpose of having these conversations about OKRs at the leadership level is a bit different than the pragmatic benefits of the agile process and the two are a bit perpendicular in terms of purposes. Agile is on the ground execution, dealing with and greasing the wheels for the day to day efficiency of small teams. OKRs are occasional shocks to the system attempting to steer a large barge on course towards a far off goal.