Ask HN: Are there any engineering orgs that use incentives? I came from a sales background, and we were constantly using incentives to improve output from the team... when I moved into software a decade ago I found that incentives programs were basically unused. That seems soooooo weird to me. Does anyone work for a company who will provide any incentives not included in standard compensation (salary, RSUs, bonus, etc)? What are the results like? |
If there's an incentive to hit 99% non-cash rates, the app just does nothing when it would normally crash. A manager decided not to release a refactor that would fix a bug because it would have jeapordize the crash rate right near bonuses.
Efforts like R&D, clean code, and other optimizations are often punished if they don't affect the bonuses.
The QA team suddenly started making tons of tickets. Misaligned padding on top left, misaligned padding on top right, misaligned padding on the icons, colors are a little off. But they failed to catch the bug where it was not possible to enter real addresses because the address box was too short.
In the long run, the project gets 70% month on month growth and then gets deprioritized.
The only time I've seen sales-like incentives work is in hourly consulting shops, where you can incentivize increasing the billable hours. In that case, the software work does directly translate to revenue.
Not even that. Hit your top sales target for the year in November, or won’t be able to hit the next higher target? Then, try to delay your customer from signing that new contract until early January, so that those sales contribute to next year’s target.
Need a sale to hit your target? Quote a lower maintenance contract, promise a feature that doesn’t exist, etc.
Occasionally, if there is a critical product they’ll give out retention bonuses, but I think those are just for people who aren’t already getting RSUs or standard bonus, which act as their own golden handcuffs. It’s more of an incentive not to leave vs an incentive to work harder.
Outside of software, during a big growth phase, they were paying people per sever they built, but this was probably 25 years ago when it was all bare metal. The people I know who were around for that said their gamed it pretty hard and made out like bandits.
The pages aren't tested to see if they can do what they're supposed to do, they're A/B tested to see which are most likely to make someone a̶c̶c̶i̶d̶e̶n̶t̶a̶l̶l̶y̵ buy something.
Do you want to look at the listing for something you bought? Clicking on it will bring you to a different listing, of an item that is still up for sale.
the thing is, sales are very individualized in general where software dev is team effort, I worked on myriad of projects/companies/… and besides “worked 4 weekends in a row to get a release out and was rewarded with ____” (should be rare occurence) I can’t imagine any reward scenario that would incentivize us