Paying Developers Like Sales People
dev.hubspot.com
dev.hubspot.com
Suppose 3 UI changes go out. How do you decide how much each increased users? Remember that money and ego are on the line.
Perhaps one was trying to drop support calls and the other increased users. Users went up, support calls stayed the same, and the team trying to drop support calls claims that they would have succeeded had the number of users not gone up. How do you resolve that?
You thought that developers saw QA as a roadblock before? Wait until they see QA keeping them from the check they think they are going to get!
And what about the developer with a half-baked UI change to improve conversion which is going to suck. How do you gently break the news that you're not even going to let the developer try to get that dangled reward?
I see no end of the potential for conflict. If I worked in an organization that announced a policy like this, I'd start shopping my resume around. Because I can see the pain coming and would like to avoid it.
Measure the change in usage for each screen or section of the app that each team worked on.
Perhaps one was trying to drop support calls and the other increased users.
Measure support calls per user (which is the right way to measure it).
You thought that developers saw QA as a roadblock before? Wait until they see QA keeping them from the check they think they are going to get
This has never been a problem for us.
How do you gently break the news that you're not even going to let the developer try to get that dangled reward.
These kind of tests can be easily randomized. If product management really thought the UI was a bad idea, they could keep the first test size really small and then only increase the sample if the design proved itself.
If I worked in an organization that announced a policy like this, I'd start shopping my resume around.
We would definitely only do it for one small part of the team that volunteered for the experiment.
Overall, any kind of performance based pay depends on the metric. If the metric is robust, the scheme can succeed. If the metric is not robust, the whole thing fails. Will the metrics I proposed be robust? I can answer your concerns and attempt to make them more robust, but I don't know if they would be robust enough. I think it would be interesting to run the experiment, and find out for real.
If, as with several of my employers, people take a long time from engaging with your website to making money for you, the tracking problems get MUCH more challenging. When you add complex social dynamics on top of it (such as person A getting person B to make a purchase), you're in for a world of fun. (Yes, I've worked on a site that had to solve exactly this problem.)
Measuring support calls per user is also not as simple as it looks. Different parts of your site generate support calls at different rates. And it isn't always obvious what part of the site generated the call. This gets worse if you have the long lead time issue that I've faced multiple times.
As for whether QA is viewed as a roadblock, that depends strongly on team dynamics. But in places I've seen that had that bad mindset, things can get very, very bad.
On the randomizing tests, sure you can limit how many users are shown the option. But when someone makes changes that introduce technical debt on the back end, that debt and resulting bugs can't be segregated out so easily. Sometimes you really just need to say no to features. Anything that limits your freedom to do that is a Bad Thing.
Now don't get me wrong. I like the idea of performance based pay. My current employer (Google) is all about performance pay. But you have to structure the incentives right. Giving people pay after the fact based on feedback from people around you creates incentives to not just optimize a flawed metric, but to work together as a team and get stuff done.
This is important enough that while I'd read with interest what the experience of this experiment was like, I'd personally not want to be involved in anything like it until I'd been convinced that it really works like you hope it will.
We've done it before. We've launched new screens, measured the usage, then done a bunch of changes to the screen and seen usage go up. We also have a lot of good data on which screens generate the support call, data on the conversions of all the different screens, etc.
But again, your points are all good. We have pretty good data. But it's nowhere near as simple and clear as the same type of measurement for a sales person. Would the data be good enough to base pay on? I don't know.
Also, the bounty scheme has largely failed in the open source world, perhaps because they bounties never saw $450,000, and I personally doubt the model could be effectively applied to an even smaller team.
Sure, many people would like to have more money, but sadly there is a lot of devwork that is of little 'financial value' that has to be done and that would surely suffer with such a system in place, driving the overall quality lower as it doesn't create a sense of improving the product, instead pushing for being awarded the largest or best bounty.
Also, it would be frustrating for developers being paid performance pay but not totally in control of their environment. Bitter infighting might occur about language and technology choices, server designs, even dev machine quality or working hours.
However, I do like the idea of proposing a general goal and asking developers to come up with their own ways to meet those goals.
There's also a more subtle difference: a sale is a discrete event, so there is a known point at which we can determine the goals have been fulfilled. Software is a living thing -- its quality can only be inferred with time. What about bugs? Flexibility to adapt to changing business requirements. Ie: if I anticipate that we will need to change out component x so i don't tightly bind to it, how do I get compensated for my foresight, when this adds a minimal amount of overhead to my development practice?
By incentivizing the completion of objectives, you are asking for the buildup of technical debt. The objectives of a salesperson (not customer relationship manager or marketer) are necessarily short-term. The objective of a healthy development organization (as I see it) is to consistently produce high-quality software that meets business objectives in a predictable and transparent way.
Programmer productivity structures almost always have or create the development goal of "meet short term objectives quickly", which is a kiss of death for long-term growth and programmer satisfaction once you have to deal with the organic mess all of the shortcuts have created.
I know it's not perfect, but doesn't the market end up doing this pretty well, especially when you throw contractors and consultants into the mix? It's perhaps not as scientific and certainly not optimal for each individual case, but in the aggregate, it would seem that the rate that developers and salespeople get paid is probably pretty fair.
The big problem is a lack of pricing transparency in the labor market.
2) Paying for performance makes a big difference in developer productivity. That why startups get so much done - they live or die based on how hard and more importantly, how effectively they work. As we've grown from a couple developers to over twenty developers, I think our pace has slowed. I'd like to see it more like the early days.
3) The best sales people can make 2X what a developer makes. As a developer, it would be nice to be able to make that much money. But the company cannot do that right now, because it cannot accurately measure my performance.
2) I think there's a lot of reasons that startups get more done, like just having fewer people.
3) If the best salespeople make 2x as much, it's because they're 2x as valuable. I also doubt that the best salespeople make 2x as much as the best developers, but if so, it's likely because they're twice as valuable. If you want to make that much, go do sales. And if you can't because you lack the skills, perhaps that tells you something about the value of salespeople :)
Concrete data point for you that I ran across in Software Estimation by Steve McConnell. The average team of 5-8 programmers can get a medium sized project done in the same calendar time as a team of 20 programmers. As teams grow beyond 20 programmers, total throughput improves. This is from a study with project side measured in lines of code. There is every reason to believe that the larger team has more reinvention within their project, and therefore their project of equivalent size has less functionality.
The fundamental reason has to do with lines of communication. As you add a person to a team, the number of lines of communication you add is the size of the team. At some point people take up more energy from others than they contribute useful work themselves. There are a myriad of organizational techniques which try to mitigate this problem, but all suffer from the defect that they force people to use less productive forms of communication (for instance writing documents that can be read by many others), and therefore lower individual productivity.
Therefore if you've got 20 developers you should seriously consider going back to a small team, find a way to partition them into groups with minimal interactions, or scale your organization up until you have a lot more developers than that. The first two try to solve organizational problems that lead to low throughput, the last accepts the issues but lets you tackle problems that the small team couldn't.
Another random suggestion. If you're interested in productivity, pick up a copy of Peopleware and Rapid Development, read them, and pick a set of best practices to try.
But still, I think we could do better. Working based on hitting external goals adds invaluable focus to a team.
Oh yeah, you're fucked.
Also, Ronald Coase on the Theory of the Firm. Strangely enough, economists have a lot of useful things to say about business ideas.
It's all about transaction and information costs. The hassle of managing and measuring programmers in this way would outweigh the benefit of keeping them working hard.
There is only so much time in a day, and that time can be spent in certain ways. You can implement a new foobarbaz feature, or you can write some tests to ensure that the gorchquux you wrote yesterday works correctly. The tests don't really add any value, right, because the feature is already there. Just add the next feature, because the user can see that (and now you get $200,000!)
The problem comes after repeating this cycle a few times. With no design upfront and no ongoing effort to make the codebase maintainable, eventually there will come a feature that you just can't add. Moving something out of the way will knock the whole pile over. Changing one line in the config file will require your newly-hired team of 10 testers to work overtime. You will be so encumbered by your technical debt that you can't add new features, you can't fix bugs, and you can't get the codebase into a state where you can do those things.
The only solution then is to redo everything. (Remember Netscape after the big rewrite? Neither do I...)
Lately, I have been on an "overengineering" kick, and I don't regret it at all. As the requirements change, my software can quickly adapt, without becoming less clean or maintainable, and without taking much of my time. This means that my software has lasting value instead of the usual "it solves my exact problem right now".
Before I type anything into the editor, the thought in my mind is, "how can I make this require less code and less developer attention later". Right now, I have plenty of time. Who knows what I'll be up to in a few years when the foo system needs that new feature. (Usually people plan the other way; I'll do this later, I'll have plenty of time tomorrow. Every time I've said that to myself, I've been wrong. So I've stopped planning like next time, I really will have time to do it right later. I won't, so I'm going to do it right now.)
The incentive structure outlined in the article encourages the opposite. It's already very difficult to "do things right". Paying someone money to not do things right is not going to make it any easier. The result will be software that is even worse than what we have now; and it's well-documented that most software is pretty bad. Shudder.
I've had sales people try to make me want to have a long-term relationship. Of course they were selling themselves at the time. ;-)
The other problem is that this may get quite expensive. Why should a business pay more when it could pay less?
Nevertheless it would be interesting if somebody tried this.