Part of it is that it creates an incentive to create wasteful systems, only to "optimize" them later to rack up a bonus. Even if it gets changed to only pay out for reducing spend incurred by other engineers, it's possible to collude in such a way to extract bonuses from the company.
A better way to have aligned incentives for the company and the employees would be to allocate a bonus pool for the entire company, from which AWS expenses are taken out of, but that might be a bit unorthodox.
> allocate a bonus pool for the entire company, from which AWS expenses are taken out of
Also a perverse incentive.
If we use ec2.small, the customer's query will take 3x longer but be half the price. Let's turn off the nightly security audits. We can live with quarterly backups, right? What do we need all these logs for, anyway? We could hack something that works together in 2 weeks, but if we spend 3 months, it could be really efficient, let's do that...
A better way to have aligned incentives for the company and the employees would be to allocate a bonus pool for the entire company, from which AWS expenses are taken out of, but that might be a bit unorthodox.