3 ms·
Perhaps the difficulty of success/failure attribution in complex engineering projects makes it hard to motivate people properly with money as the primary means.
by 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 agoThe 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 agoThere 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.