The Number Won't Explain Itself
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
We hung a sixty-two above the standup board
Like a preacher's verdict, like a closing chord
Nobody asked it how it got that low
Just nodded at the color and let it go
But a number with no story is just a stone somebody threw
And the room went quiet, waiting on a clue
A good metric can explain itself
Show its work, don't hide it on a shelf
Tell me what broke and tell me what it cost
Don't just point and tell me something's lost
My foreman used to grade us with a wave of his hand
Called it instinct, called it years spent on the land
But when the crop came thin he never said just why
Just shook his head and told us we should try
Now I write the reasons down beside the score I give
So when it stings, at least a man knows how to live
A good metric can explain itself
Show its work, don't hide it on a shelf
Tell me what broke and tell me what it cost
Don't just point and tell me something's lost
You can argue with a reason
You can't argue with a shade of red
One gives you a road to travel
One just fills you full of dread
So weigh the rollback heavier
Say so out loud, say it plain
Let the model take the questions
Instead of wearing all the blame
So hang your number soft and low
Just a door to what you didn't know
Not the end of talking — just the start
A good score points you to the harder part
The band
The On-Call
A weathered tenor, close-mic'd with a little rasp, telling it plainly. A specific person, a specific night and a lesson learned the expensive way - warm, and never preachy about it.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post A Good Engineering Metric Can Explain Itself.
Engineering health metrics are useful only when they show the evidence and trade-offs behind the number.
More by The On-Call
- Honest Data 4:57
- Twice for Nothing 4:37
- The Return Visit 3:07
- Learning Is the Load 3:40