Thought I’d get back into the groove, but this week I ended up in the hospital…

Thought I’d get back into the groove, but this week I ended up in the hospital by pure dumb chance. Anyway, alive and kicking.

Now to the point. There’s this thread (https://x.com/deedydas/status/1862138506774213061?s=46) about motivating engineers in corporations that popped up from one of my favorite investors these days.

I’ll allow myself a loose translation plus my two cents:

1/ there’s this myth or misunderstanding like engineers (read: programmers) are lazy and basically do nothing and don’t want to. Not quite. More like in modern corporations the incentives are built like a 1950s factory.

2/ meaning there are zero rewards for simplifying or deleting unnecessary parts of code/process. If you did something fast — that means the task was easy. Most tasks don’t make any meaningful changes to the product, they just move KPIs forward by a couple percentage points. Remember all those LinkedIns “increased conversion by 1.5%”, and even if the business won big, the task is still boring because you’re probably sawing together a framework for A/B tests.

3/ don’t like your current job — switch and find a new one, a competent engineer can afford that, so the risk of getting fired is low. Innovation is swapping out middle managers, who get rotated so they don’t rock the boat.

4/ almost all the shares in your option grant or bonuses tied to the company-wide KPI have nothing to do with your work. Your code very rarely affects the company’s stock price growth. You feel like a significant part of your income (and sometimes the bigger part) doesn’t relate to you at all.

5/ turnover is weak; if people are weak no one will touch them because hiring is more expensive than keeping mediocre people. Shareholders rarely demand firing anyone, unless it’s really completely hopeless, but then they just cut to prop up the numbers, not to fix the quality situation.

6/ all review systems are total trash. The evaluation system gets hacked through friendships, doing only “important” tasks, etc. Goodhart’s law. Any productivity metrics can be hacked and they will be.

7/ all these calibrations flatten all teams into one big stream where there are no best and worst. No demotions, meaning a promotion gives you a sense of safety no matter what.

Pretty sure this is how it is almost everywhere with 10k+ people, maybe even less. In my experience even smaller companies have all these traits. When you start measuring intellectual work it turns out fixing 2 bugs a week is more “effective” than inventing a new product.

TLDR:
The only way to seriously increase income is to get promoted. Promo packets and politics matter more than building a quality product.