3 ms·

So recently I was discussing with a colleague how misalignment of incentives has shafted our team in a certain Big Tech. I'm part of a high performing team, an

So recently I was discussing with a colleague how misalignment of incentives has shafted our team in a certain Big Tech. I'm part of a high performing team, and for the last few years we have been delivering high quality output while hardly increasing our team size. We have a sister team that is, to put it politely, not as high performing. They have been struggling to deliver even though the have almost twice as many engineers. Last year we got some headcount to grow our team, but leadership decided to shift it to our sister team, since they had problems reaching their goals (you know, the squeaky wheel gets the grease). This was fine with us since we weren't in a particular hurry, and we would pick up the headcount later. Fast forward and we have a hiring freeze, meaning that our sister team was able to grow headcount, while we can't grow ours. The double whammy? since we don't have as many people as we expected, we couldn't pick up projects that were in our roadmap. Guess who got those projects instead? our sister team. Morale of the story? do a shit job and you will be rewarded with bigger teams and more scope, which in turn will translate into promotions and bonuses.

o10449366 3y ago
I've had the same experience at the big tech company I worked at. I expressed these frustrations to upper management and the explanation I was given was that for many of these big companies, their goal is to grow their 1,000 sub-businesses to 10 million ARR businesses each. Growing these 10 million ARR units to 100 million ARR is much more difficult than going from 0 to 10 million, and so when they have a successful unit, they disproportionally reinvest that success into the poor performers (the 0-2 million ARR units). This felt backwards and unfair to me as an engineer on the teams that worked hard to get to the 10 million mark. It really sucked seeing my team lose headcount or engineers to less successful and poorly designed/managed projects. But from a business perspective on the larger scale I see why they do it - I just think it creates a poor engineering culture and, in the long-term, a sub-par customer experience because velocity in product development slows when projects are de-invested or put into KTLO.
- angarg12 3y ago
  I kind of see your point at the macro level, but in our case we are both working in the same product, and contributing to the same bottom line. I see no strategic advantage on shifting resources from a high to a low performing team. And of course the triple whammy happens when low quality software written by one team is handed over to a better team to fix it. I'm going through that right now. We have an upstream dependency that it's always causing all sorts of trouble. We've been told by leadership that if we notice issues we should go fix them ourselves rather than asking the other team to fix it. Go back to the incentives, what message are we sending the other team?
wkdneidbwf 3y ago
is it common to roadmap features your team can’t deliver at their current size? that sounds like a problem. also, the team that takes on the most work but does it poorly getting the promotions and bonuses also sounds like a problem. both of those thing aren’t problems with developers though—theyre management problems. i would interpret the moral as bad management leads to sub-optimal outcomes for developers. not advocating correctly for headcount, and not showcasing the high quality work your team does are literally what your manager should be doing.
- otoburb 3y ago
  >>[...] both of those thing aren’t problems with developers though—theyre management problems. Sounds like the sister team had a better manager in some aspects of "managing" (e.g. managing the message up the chain) compared to the OP's manager who may have been great at facilitating (or minimizing meddling with) the high performing team but was less skilled in managing up.
  - wkdneidbwf 3y ago
    agreed, i like your perspective. so hypothetically, what do you do here? ideally these managers should learn from one another. should we send them to a tropical off-site?! joking
- angarg12 3y ago
  > is it common to roadmap features your team can’t deliver at their current size? that sounds like a problem. Remember, we had the headcount last year, and we planned our roadmap accordingly (in fact my company tends to plan at least 1 year out to a certain level of detail). When they shifted the headcount, we just pushed the projects back. However this year came and we didn't have the people to deliver on our roadmap. About your second part, I cannot say since I am not present in those meetings. I have always found my manager pretty good, but there are some things that are just outside his control.
gmarx 3y ago
Decades ago when I was getting started there was a team that fell way behind and everyone on the team worked weekends and many days until midnight and finally delivered some buggy arguable product 6 months late. They were hailed as heroes. No one even noticed me and my team delivering on time. I learned a valuable and entirely inapplicable lesson.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  IME this can sometimes be overcome with a bit of self promotion. Don't let accomplishments be forgotten or overshadowed. It is a political game. Also teach the execs that heroism doesn't scale. We all want to be entertained by the hero stories, but no one actually wants to live in a world that requires high-visibility heroics.
  - gmarx 3y ago
    I understand this intellectually but it is just exhausting
Tade0 3y ago
> They have been struggling to deliver even though the have almost twice as many engineers. My experience tells me that they struggled because they had twice as many engineers. I don't think I've been to a 20+ person project which could honestly be called "successful". Hard to say if it's a symptom or a cause. Personally I lean towards the former, because when someone tries to throw people at a problem they either don't know what they're doing or delivering is not their priority.
Scramblejams 3y ago
Frustrating dynamic. Something similar played out for me in a different industry, where a company doled out a bunch of different parts of a large project to different subcontractors. The subcontractor I was working at was apparently the only one that hit the dates and deliverables. So we got put on pause (aka defunded) while the other contractors were paid to catch up. I never was sure why some of the unfinished work wasn't shifted to us, but the end result was the same as yours -- getting penalized for doing the demonstrably superior work.
tennisflyi 3y ago
Can’t be promoted if you’re too good/irreplaceable.
- nine_k 3y ago
  It could be compensated at least by a pay raise.
charlie0 3y ago
This the type of bs that would make me start thinking about starting my own company.
- angarg12 3y ago
  I'm not brave enough to start my own company, but I'd definitely like to try a much smaller shop where people can't play politics so hard.

o10449366 3y ago

I've had the same experience at the big tech company I worked at. I expressed these frustrations to upper management and the explanation I was given was that for many of these big companies, their goal is to grow their 1,000 sub-businesses to 10 million ARR businesses each. Growing these 10 million ARR units to 100 million ARR is much more difficult than going from 0 to 10 million, and so when they have a successful unit, they disproportionally reinvest that success into the poor performers (the 0-2 million ARR units). This felt backwards and unfair to me as an engineer on the teams that worked hard to get to the 10 million mark. It really sucked seeing my team lose headcount or engineers to less successful and poorly designed/managed projects. But from a business perspective on the larger scale I see why they do it - I just think it creates a poor engineering culture and, in the long-term, a sub-par customer experience because velocity in product development slows when projects are de-invested or put into KTLO.

angarg12 3y ago
I kind of see your point at the macro level, but in our case we are both working in the same product, and contributing to the same bottom line. I see no strategic advantage on shifting resources from a high to a low performing team. And of course the triple whammy happens when low quality software written by one team is handed over to a better team to fix it. I'm going through that right now. We have an upstream dependency that it's always causing all sorts of trouble. We've been told by leadership that if we notice issues we should go fix them ourselves rather than asking the other team to fix it. Go back to the incentives, what message are we sending the other team?

wkdneidbwf 3y ago

is it common to roadmap features your team can’t deliver at their current size? that sounds like a problem. also, the team that takes on the most work but does it poorly getting the promotions and bonuses also sounds like a problem. both of those thing aren’t problems with developers though—theyre management problems. i would interpret the moral as bad management leads to sub-optimal outcomes for developers. not advocating correctly for headcount, and not showcasing the high quality work your team does are literally what your manager should be doing.

otoburb 3y ago
>>[...] both of those thing aren’t problems with developers though—theyre management problems. Sounds like the sister team had a better manager in some aspects of "managing" (e.g. managing the message up the chain) compared to the OP's manager who may have been great at facilitating (or minimizing meddling with) the high performing team but was less skilled in managing up.
- wkdneidbwf 3y ago
  agreed, i like your perspective. so hypothetically, what do you do here? ideally these managers should learn from one another. should we send them to a tropical off-site?! joking
angarg12 3y ago
> is it common to roadmap features your team can’t deliver at their current size? that sounds like a problem. Remember, we had the headcount last year, and we planned our roadmap accordingly (in fact my company tends to plan at least 1 year out to a certain level of detail). When they shifted the headcount, we just pushed the projects back. However this year came and we didn't have the people to deliver on our roadmap. About your second part, I cannot say since I am not present in those meetings. I have always found my manager pretty good, but there are some things that are just outside his control.

gmarx 3y ago

Decades ago when I was getting started there was a team that fell way behind and everyone on the team worked weekends and many days until midnight and finally delivered some buggy arguable product 6 months late. They were hailed as heroes. No one even noticed me and my team delivering on time. I learned a valuable and entirely inapplicable lesson.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
IME this can sometimes be overcome with a bit of self promotion. Don't let accomplishments be forgotten or overshadowed. It is a political game. Also teach the execs that heroism doesn't scale. We all want to be entertained by the hero stories, but no one actually wants to live in a world that requires high-visibility heroics.
- gmarx 3y ago
  I understand this intellectually but it is just exhausting

Tade0 3y ago

> They have been struggling to deliver even though the have almost twice as many engineers. My experience tells me that they struggled because they had twice as many engineers. I don't think I've been to a 20+ person project which could honestly be called "successful". Hard to say if it's a symptom or a cause. Personally I lean towards the former, because when someone tries to throw people at a problem they either don't know what they're doing or delivering is not their priority.

Scramblejams 3y ago

Frustrating dynamic. Something similar played out for me in a different industry, where a company doled out a bunch of different parts of a large project to different subcontractors. The subcontractor I was working at was apparently the only one that hit the dates and deliverables. So we got put on pause (aka defunded) while the other contractors were paid to catch up. I never was sure why some of the unfinished work wasn't shifted to us, but the end result was the same as yours -- getting penalized for doing the demonstrably superior work.

tennisflyi 3y ago

Can’t be promoted if you’re too good/irreplaceable.

nine_k 3y ago
It could be compensated at least by a pay raise.

charlie0 3y ago

This the type of bs that would make me start thinking about starting my own company.

angarg12 3y ago
I'm not brave enough to start my own company, but I'd definitely like to try a much smaller shop where people can't play politics so hard.