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Incentives often cause really nasty political wars within orgs. When a site gives a 500 because a database went down and the web app couldn't connect to it...
by jboy55 11y ago
Incentives often cause really nasty political wars within orgs.
When a site gives a 500 because a database went down and the web app couldn't connect to it... is that a bug, a missed test case or should ops take a hit on down time? Furthermore, if you argue that the dev team should have reasonable failsafes in code to connect to a db, in a 10 year old organization, should the current Dev team pay for something that could have been in the code for years?
If you set up a system where devs hand off to QA then they hand off to ops to deploy. Furthermore every step is incentivised somewhat against each other. Even if all teams are equal, it ends up in my opinion, to the path to CYA and Waterfall. Everyone is more concerned with problems not being 'their' fault than shipping good code.
- jrumbut 11y agoYou're absolutely right, assuming we're talking about business/consumer apps and not pacemakers or rocket ships. An incentive/penalty system for bugs without an incentive/penalty system for features completed leads to paralysis. And a complicated incentive system leads to game playing over productivity. It's an old saying: be careful what you measure because you'll get a lot more of it.
- jboy55 11y agoI'm beginning to think that the best incentive system is just a good base pay, with an emphasis on personal learning and growth. Have engineers strive to become better engineers by taking courses, attending meetings and publishing content. Quality will fall out of that as a positive side-effect.