[ath3nd]

Who is bonusing who?

I think some people simply can't get rid of the idea that there has to be some external paternalistic figure that looks over developers' shoulder and guides the poor hapless saps and their incentives. Do they give candy to the good boys/girls and coal to the bad ones? You might be thinking of Santa.

The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, easy to sell, popular and reliable product. Management types insisting to compartmentalize incentives is them trying to have an excuse for their own existence.

We should all drag ourselves kicking and screaming to the reality that we can do much more with much less management layers. Even big companies, which are bloated beyond saving, are waking up to that fact. PMs are the first to go, just look at what Meta, a notoriously inefficient company is doing to their non technical PMs.

Think for a second why nobody has had the idea of letting an engineer be a 'Marketing Project Manager' of the marketing team and be calling the shots what campaigns to run, what marketing materials to produce, and make marketers estimate with poker cards how many of their leads will turn to a sale. Sounds stupid, right? Yet this is exactly what you want us to accept the other way around. Not gonna happen.

There is no excuse to have non engineers embedded in and actually calling the shots on behalf of an engineering team with the patronizing though that the engineers can't decide for themselves what to build and how to prioritize it.

[Hasu]

> The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, easy to sell, popular and reliable product.

Being on a team where everyone has a high level of personal ownership and accountability like that is truly wonderful, and I agree, it works great.

You just have to find (or build) a company that explicitly filters out the 99% of people who only want a job for the paycheck and don't care about the customers, the software, or the product.

[ryandrake]

> The developers and sre's incentives are the same as everybody else in the company: have a great, easy to sell, popular and reliable product.

The hard part is how do you design a compensation package for a developer or sre worker bee, to incentivize these? How do you make their bonus depend on something as nebulous and hard to measure as "greatness" or "popular"?

For most employees, the candy/coal model works. You're not going to find low-level individual contributors who work because they just want to make a great product.

[ath3nd]

I might verging on socialism here, but I think the best way to motivate employees is ownership of the company and direct profit sharing.

Unfortunately, only the first part is practiced in my organization (company shares), but I am actively fighting for the second.

[ryandrake]

I'm going to part with the accepted dogma to say that I don't think that equity ownership motivates workers towards doing a good job, at least at large companies. If you are engineer number 54,291 moving a protobuf from one layer in the stack to another, nothing you do is going to move the needle on the stock price, either positive or negative. You could write the best, most efficient code, fully unit tested and crash-free, but if Morgan Stanley downgrades the company's stock because of some bad earnings call, it's going to go down.

I have equity as part of my comp package, and I know there is zero link between how good a job I do and which way the Wall Street Wind blows today. So to me it's just like cash but with extra steps.

Maybe it's different in the startup world, I don't know. The only startup I was part of, everyone's equity went to zero when the business failed, regardless of how well anyone did their job, so I'm not much of a believer.

[baq]

That’s what dividends should be doing, right? Or do you want the holy grail of percentage of gross revenue which is so outrageous to everyone only payment processors charge it because they can?