What if engineers had incentives, too?
I’ve yet to meet an engineering team that over-delivered on its commitments. -Praveen Seshadri (ex-Google)
Given this, I think engineers should be open to experimenting with different incentive schemes, with a goal of boosting either quantity or quality.
Quantity is the obvious one. Say an engineer is given 15 points of tickets at the beginning of a sprint. If that engineer delivers 20 or 25 points, they could be rewarded with extra compensation. More points, more $.
Quality is trickier, but potentially you track bugs and associate each with a single engineer. It gets messy when a bug is linked to multiple engineers, but I imagine there's a clever scoring system that could account for this. In any case, the idea would be to reward engineers whose code is the highest quality. Fewer bugs, more $.
Equity (company ownership) is a powerful incentive as well, but only at the earliest of stages. Later in the game there’s less to give away, so equity doesn’t matter as much.
There are of course a few reasons these ideas might not work:
- Rewarding quantity could hurt quality
- Individual incentive schemes could affect teamwork + collaboration
- It's hard to measure quality
- When there's a lot of legacy code, a fair bug attribution model would be extremely complex and probably not worthwhile
In most fields where individual brilliance can have outsized impact (e.g., sports, finance), there are powerful incentive schemes to promote 10x performance. Oddly, this doesn't really exist for engineers. It would be challenging to craft a system that works for engineers. But there are at least a couple ways I think you could do it, and teams interested in boosting performance should experiment to find something that works for them.