[diogenes_atx]

It's interesting that the author does not even consider the impact of incentives on performance. As Charlie Munger famously said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." It is true that collaboration becomes increasingly difficult as the team grows in size, but collaboration is not the fundamental problem. To manage a large team, the real challenge is to design incentives that properly reward those who produce and perform, and penalize those who don't. People respond to incentives (yes, it is a tautology, and that is precisely the point).

[timcobb]

What kind of incentives are possible in your average tech work environment? A raise? A bonus? Raises usually come with more responsibility. I'm not familiar with tech companies doing bonuses.

[quirkot]

Money is the sledgehammer of incentives. Above a reasonable amount of pay, it's overkill and makes lots of collateral problems. The really effective incentives are status based and situational to the group dynamic

[timcobb]

Can you give an example please. How do you do this without introducing bad vibes?

[GVIrish]

Starts with how you evaluate employees for bonuses and promotion. Do you evaluate people on the impact of what was delivered? How fast they delivered feature work? The quality level of what they delivered? How well they worked with others?

The answers to basic questions like that already starts to shape behavior. If you pay zero attention to how people behave, and only look at impact of what was delivered you may promote people who optimize for their own work, but make others miserable. If you don't properly weight quality, especially now with AI code gen, you'll promote people who move fast break more things than is reasonable.

We can easily find examples of suboptimal behavior that arises out of poorly shaped rewards incentives at companies. Empire building is one behavior that is the result of managers getting promoted based on headcount. Stack ranking can and has led to people limiting collaboration with peers because someone has to fail in order for someone else to get a favorable rating. Or people avoid riskier work because failure can put you on the hot seat.

[anon7725]

From the article:

> You're part of a team, you're contributing, you're also (measurably) pulling less hard than you would if the rope were yours alone

There’s a perfectly rational reason for this. Success is collective, but failure is individual.

Rewards for the success accrue to the person who represents it to the right people (usually those with the shortest path to the organization root).

For all intents and purposes, the person who gives the presentation did the work.

[recursive]

Hours of PTO?

[paradox460]

Sure, you did a great job on that last project, we've added 8 hours of PTO for you. No, you can't take it any time soon, we're far too busy for you to take any time off

[timcobb]

What if you have "unlimited" PTO

[kabdib]

"The reward for winning is the opportunity to play again"

[timcobb]

That's what it seems like :)

[sosodev]

Can we actually align incentives at scale? It seems to me that if it were possible we would live in a utopia.

[lotyrin]

The issue is that systems don't account for the diversity in how people are motivated and what parts of systems they are sensitive to and how they are sensitive to them.

By default in the dominant culture, most systems come down to individual incentives for individual drive and shame dynamics for collective drive, and that covers a decent chunk of how people are motivated, but leaves out people who are motivated differently and actively harms people for whom these are paralyzing.

[red-iron-pine]

there is no accounting for taste. some people are okay getting paid just a basic amount and going home and living life.

others need to fill a gap -- the "insecure overachiever" demographic.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180924-are-you-an-ins...

how do align ruthless sociopaths, gropy / rapey executives, angry mother hens, and phone-it-in interns?