This is surprising. Based on the relative success of the financial industry, I would have guessed that it's easier to organize a company when people are motivated by (and responsive to) money.
People who aren't motivated by money are much harder to organize/control and in a corporate structure that seems like a weakness not a strength.
But early Google's results speak for themselves. Not much to argue with...
The financial industry tends to have clearer attribution and shorter feedback cycle, in some way similar to sales, and this allows tangible rewards to be given out more objectively.
I’m not minimizing the problem of the latter, but there’s plenty of the former.
I'm thinking it goes the other way. It's hard, once you get larger than Dunbar's number, it's very hard for organizations to understand what everyone is up to and what they think about it. The straightforward financial rewards are to keep things simple for the people in charge of strategy and organizational health in general.
The issue I've seen at Google with people who are money, or more likely promotion, obsessed is that they start prioritizing work which will help them get promoted or a good review. This probably works well when it's easy to objectively identify work performance like in sales and I imagine in finance, so perhaps that's why it works well there, but for SWEs it's often difficult to objectively measure impact in my opinion.
So then this misalignment in what's rewarded and what is good for the team will cause issues because people who just focus on the team's well being might end up always doing the work that is not financially rewarded while those who want to be promoted fight for the projects that matter for promotion.
An interesting thing to note is that even though the compensation has decreased recently as far as I know, we all still get paid extremely well so while I would have thought that would prevent people from caring so much about promotion, that seems to not be the case.
That is also organizationally problematic though.
Not to say that keeping the lights on can’t be a rewarding problem to work on, good plumbers will take pride in there work and find it interesting. But do you care if your plumbers are passionate about the building they are working on? No.