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I have given the problem of how to correctly compensate according to productivity some thought, and one idea I keep revisiting are auctions. Assuming that you

I have given the problem of how to correctly compensate according to productivity some thought, and one idea I keep revisiting are auctions. Assuming that you have a fairly good idea of what needs to be done and how to divide it up into reasonable chunks, I could imagine an auction where you just create a list of things and programmers in your company freely bid on them with how much money they’ll be paid for completing each task. The system doesn’t have to be complete. Imagine auctioning off the top x% most urgent bugs to be fixed every sprint, reviewing PRs, etc as extra work. There are some very big flaws with this approach, namely that requirement specifications are basically impossible to get right and review and that incentive structures are not well aligned: - If I bid $5000 to fix a bug, but introduce $10,000 of technical debt into the codebase, then I just made money by externalising the cost. - It makes you compete with your colleagues for buds and that creates a really hostile work environment that probably drastically decreases workout pace efficiency So it’s just been an idea that’s been floating around my head, but maybe an econ grad student can work something out from this.

simne 4y ago
Nice try. From history of aviation known, in USSR in 1920s tried to increase productivity of all production in similar way. They accepted ANY suggestion and pay for them average few pennies (for more economy effect paid more money). And said, documents shown thousands suggestions and payments, some people made hundreds suggestions per month, and this was significant increase to their salary. But this lasts only few months, because people for these pennies suggest mostly useless things and in some cases even harmful. For example, in planes construction used oval aluminum tubes, to save weight and to make slightly less air drag. One suggests to use cheap steel round tubes. Aluminum was expensive, so this was extremely economy effective, but plane load decrease about 20% and speed decreased also about 20%, and this was not acceptable.

simne 4y ago

Nice try. From history of aviation known, in USSR in 1920s tried to increase productivity of all production in similar way. They accepted ANY suggestion and pay for them average few pennies (for more economy effect paid more money). And said, documents shown thousands suggestions and payments, some people made hundreds suggestions per month, and this was significant increase to their salary. But this lasts only few months, because people for these pennies suggest mostly useless things and in some cases even harmful. For example, in planes construction used oval aluminum tubes, to save weight and to make slightly less air drag. One suggests to use cheap steel round tubes. Aluminum was expensive, so this was extremely economy effective, but plane load decrease about 20% and speed decreased also about 20%, and this was not acceptable.