

Pay incentives in the tech industry - typicaljoe
http://blog.joesgoals.com/2008/08/27/pay-incentives-in-the-tech-industry/

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benjamincanfly
This paragraph is a real nugget:

> In most organizations the developers are some of the highest paid employees.
> They get paid well because their skills are scarce and hard to reacquire.
> This leads to entrenched “senior” developers who produce little, but “know”
> (and therefore get paid) a whole lot. It also shifts the emphasis to
> stability and away from being quick, nimble, and adaptive. Over time this
> turns your development teams into an occupying force rather than a fighting
> force.

When this process is unhindered a company's right brain starts to wither and
die.

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wildwood
This seems like a great short-term incentive, but impractical long-term, like
in <http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Defect-Black-Market.aspx>

He said that, in that week, the code base was reduced by 90%, which probably
accounted for a fair chunk of the bonuses. Odds are, the code base won't be
reducible by another 90% any time soon.

Now, doing something similar another week for test coverage, or some other way
that the code base is lacking, makes plenty of sense. But it doesn't seem
viable as a long-term bonus strategy.

~~~
ajross
Indeed. This seems to be putting a "price" (really, with those numbers, these
are just game-like "points", they aren't going to change anyone's compensation
meaningfully) on what amounts to the low hanging fruit of the development
world.

Yes, all that stuff is good. But you can do all that right, constantly
refactor code, write tests to avoid "rolling out bugs caught by others", and
_still_ have an expensive, out-of-control project. This just seems like a way
to turn otherwise wasted developer cycles in to busywork. It's seems fine, and
might be fun for a while, but I can't see this making a huge difference in the
long term

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acesamped
personally, I love stock options :-)

they're completely useless, but then again, they're oh so useful. haha.

