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Why not? If you want good meat, give financial incentives to your butcher. If you want good policing, give financial incentives to your police. The problem isn'

by cm2187 2y ago

Why not? If you want good meat, give financial incentives to your butcher. If you want good policing, give financial incentives to your police. The problem isn't the presence of financial incentives, but badly designed financial incentives.

moomin 2y ago
The problem’s deeper than that: and financial incentive you design, you provide a financial incentive to abuse it. This is why so few people recommend metric-based compensation.
- cm2187 2y ago
  Not sure where you saw that few people recommend that. In a company, managers are routinely incentivised based on specific metrics (good or bad, typically budget plus some softer metrics). It's the norm, not the exception. It was even the case in communist russia by the way. With horribly designed metrics, like maximising tonnage of a factory output, which lead factory managers to ditch better product for lesser, heavier products. I think it was described in the book Red Plenty. Again the problem isn't incentives, it is badly designed incentives.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > It's the norm, not the exception. That doesn’t make it good. In both cases, it’s probably heavily responsible for the enshittification we see everywhere. Every metric winds up gamed.
  - moomin 2y ago
    Yeah, perhaps I should have qualified it with “no-one who knows what they’re doing”.
BrenBarn 2y ago
> If you want good policing, give financial incentives to your police. But civil asset forfeiture isn't incentivizing good policing.
- cm2187 2y ago
  Agree, that's an example of a badly designed incentive.
noisy_boy 2y ago
Depends on the definition of the financial incentive. If it means bonus, then this doesn't handle cases of incompetence or malice, they will still get their salary. If that includes salary too e.g. financial penalties, then you'll get police doing things specifically to preserve their salary and instead of focusing on their core responsibilities. Just carrots, whatever the definition, won't fix everything, there are assholes in every profession, you need sticks too.
l72 2y ago
If your SRE gets a bonus every time they fix an issue in production, you would start incentivizing them to make sure production has lots of issues they can easily fix and get their bonus. If you de-incentivize them every time there is a problem, they will instead try to hide problems. How do you come up with fair incentivization?

by cm2187 2y ago

moomin 2y ago

The problem’s deeper than that: and financial incentive you design, you provide a financial incentive to abuse it. This is why so few people recommend metric-based compensation.

cm2187 2y ago
Not sure where you saw that few people recommend that. In a company, managers are routinely incentivised based on specific metrics (good or bad, typically budget plus some softer metrics). It's the norm, not the exception. It was even the case in communist russia by the way. With horribly designed metrics, like maximising tonnage of a factory output, which lead factory managers to ditch better product for lesser, heavier products. I think it was described in the book Red Plenty. Again the problem isn't incentives, it is badly designed incentives.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  > It's the norm, not the exception. That doesn’t make it good. In both cases, it’s probably heavily responsible for the enshittification we see everywhere. Every metric winds up gamed.
- moomin 2y ago
  Yeah, perhaps I should have qualified it with “no-one who knows what they’re doing”.

BrenBarn 2y ago

> If you want good policing, give financial incentives to your police. But civil asset forfeiture isn't incentivizing good policing.

cm2187 2y ago
Agree, that's an example of a badly designed incentive.

noisy_boy 2y ago

Depends on the definition of the financial incentive. If it means bonus, then this doesn't handle cases of incompetence or malice, they will still get their salary. If that includes salary too e.g. financial penalties, then you'll get police doing things specifically to preserve their salary and instead of focusing on their core responsibilities. Just carrots, whatever the definition, won't fix everything, there are assholes in every profession, you need sticks too.

l72 2y ago

If your SRE gets a bonus every time they fix an issue in production, you would start incentivizing them to make sure production has lots of issues they can easily fix and get their bonus. If you de-incentivize them every time there is a problem, they will instead try to hide problems. How do you come up with fair incentivization?