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> influx of people responding primarily to financial rewards (related). This is surprising. Based on the relative success of the financial industry, I would ha

> influx of people responding primarily to financial rewards (related). This is surprising. Based on the relative success of the financial industry, I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money. People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength. But early Google's results speak for themselves. Not much to argue with...

humanrebar 9y ago
> ...I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money I'm thinking it goes the other way. It's hard, once you get larger than Dunbar's number, it's very hard for organizations to understand what everyone is up to and what they think about it. The straightforward financial rewards are to keep things simple for the people in charge of strategy and organizational health in general.
nopinsight 9y ago
Perhaps the difficulty of success/failure attribution in complex engineering projects makes it hard to motivate people properly with money as the primary means. One might be able to hide bad hacks/technical debts in a product for a long time after one is promoted or has received bonuses. It might not always be clear why the decisions were made and who others helped shape the decisions as well. The financial industry tends to have clearer attribution and shorter feedback cycle, in some way similar to sales, and this allows tangible rewards to be given out more objectively.
- mattnewport 9y ago
  The equivalent of bad hacks / technical debts exist in the financial industry, it's just when they blow up the cost gets socialized onto the rest of society. This is basically what happened in the financial crisis.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    There are a lot of hacks in finance that play out and cost only the company making the errors dearly. It’s probably 99+% of them, but you hear about the half-dozen that got larger than that. I’m not minimizing the problem of the latter, but there’s plenty of the former.
wils1245 9y ago
Depending on the role, I find it hard to believe that people being motivated by money is a bad thing as the company grows. Sure, at a start up it’s easy to connect the dots with what you work on and your end-customers, so it’s good to care about and empathize with them. But if your job is to keep the lights on, that passion for the cause isn’t going to feel vindicated too often. Not to say that keeping the lights on can’t be a rewarding problem to work on, good plumbers will take pride in there work and find it interesting. But do you care if your plumbers are passionate about the building they are working on? No.
paulie_a 9y ago
They have a huge burnout rate. If you are not interested in having a life for 5-10 years, I am sure the money is great. That is also organizationally problematic though.
rifung 9y ago
> People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength. The issue I've seen at Google with people who are money, or more likely promotion, obsessed is that they start prioritizing work which will help them get promoted or a good review. This probably works well when it's easy to objectively identify work performance like in sales and I imagine in finance, so perhaps that's why it works well there, but for SWEs it's often difficult to objectively measure impact in my opinion. So then this misalignment in what's rewarded and what is good for the team will cause issues because people who just focus on the team's well being might end up always doing the work that is not financially rewarded while those who want to be promoted fight for the projects that matter for promotion. An interesting thing to note is that even though the compensation has decreased recently as far as I know, we all still get paid extremely well so while I would have thought that would prevent people from caring so much about promotion, that seems to not be the case.
- closeparen 9y ago
  If you’re not a homeowner yet, you need raises at least as fast as real estate is appreciating to feel like you have a fighting chance (or even to maintain your standard of living under rising rent).

humanrebar 9y ago

> ...I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money I'm thinking it goes the other way. It's hard, once you get larger than Dunbar's number, it's very hard for organizations to understand what everyone is up to and what they think about it. The straightforward financial rewards are to keep things simple for the people in charge of strategy and organizational health in general.

nopinsight 9y ago

Perhaps the difficulty of success/failure attribution in complex engineering projects makes it hard to motivate people properly with money as the primary means. One might be able to hide bad hacks/technical debts in a product for a long time after one is promoted or has received bonuses. It might not always be clear why the decisions were made and who others helped shape the decisions as well. The financial industry tends to have clearer attribution and shorter feedback cycle, in some way similar to sales, and this allows tangible rewards to be given out more objectively.

mattnewport 9y ago
The equivalent of bad hacks / technical debts exist in the financial industry, it's just when they blow up the cost gets socialized onto the rest of society. This is basically what happened in the financial crisis.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  There are a lot of hacks in finance that play out and cost only the company making the errors dearly. It’s probably 99+% of them, but you hear about the half-dozen that got larger than that. I’m not minimizing the problem of the latter, but there’s plenty of the former.

wils1245 9y ago

Depending on the role, I find it hard to believe that people being motivated by money is a bad thing as the company grows. Sure, at a start up it’s easy to connect the dots with what you work on and your end-customers, so it’s good to care about and empathize with them. But if your job is to keep the lights on, that passion for the cause isn’t going to feel vindicated too often. Not to say that keeping the lights on can’t be a rewarding problem to work on, good plumbers will take pride in there work and find it interesting. But do you care if your plumbers are passionate about the building they are working on? No.

paulie_a 9y ago

They have a huge burnout rate. If you are not interested in having a life for 5-10 years, I am sure the money is great. That is also organizationally problematic though.

rifung 9y ago

> People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength. The issue I've seen at Google with people who are money, or more likely promotion, obsessed is that they start prioritizing work which will help them get promoted or a good review. This probably works well when it's easy to objectively identify work performance like in sales and I imagine in finance, so perhaps that's why it works well there, but for SWEs it's often difficult to objectively measure impact in my opinion. So then this misalignment in what's rewarded and what is good for the team will cause issues because people who just focus on the team's well being might end up always doing the work that is not financially rewarded while those who want to be promoted fight for the projects that matter for promotion. An interesting thing to note is that even though the compensation has decreased recently as far as I know, we all still get paid extremely well so while I would have thought that would prevent people from caring so much about promotion, that seems to not be the case.

closeparen 9y ago
If you’re not a homeowner yet, you need raises at least as fast as real estate is appreciating to feel like you have a fighting chance (or even to maintain your standard of living under rising rent).