[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?