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Ask HN: Are there any engineering orgs that use incentives?

3 points by jppope ↗ HN
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?

7 comments

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bdangubic
how would this work? in sales it is straight forward, yes? you sell X, above projected Y, you get rewarded Z. how would this even work in software? I am projected to fix 37 bugs per week, I get bonus if I fix 51?

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

codingdave
Rarely, because incentives encourage gaming the system. In sales, it is fairly easy to make the game benefit both the sales folks and the business because sales directly drives revenue. Game it however you want, everyone wins. But software does not directly translate into revenue, so once you start setting up incentives, gaming that system can completely derail the actual business goals unless you are exceedingly careful about it.

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.

didgetmaster
Reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss tells his team they were going to start paying the developers to fix bugs. Wally tells everyone that he is going to code himself a minivan.
Someone
> In sales, it is fairly easy to make the game benefit both the sales folks and the business because sales directly drives revenue. Game it however you want, everyone wins

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.

dlcarrier
A family member of mine worked at eBay, and they just used sales metrics in their engineering.

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.

al_borland
They try, with things like employee recognition programs and things of that nature. I don’t know anyone that really cares. The only people who get the recognitions regularly are people who ask for them in a kind of quid pro quo when they help someone out. This is usually done when someone is eyeing a promotion and looking to really sell it to management.

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.

muzani
We did it before. OKRs and such.

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.