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My take on these BigCos is that there is so much middle management and hierarchy that the frontline workers are blocked from the actual performance of the company.

My proposed fix is entire product groups and their members should be held accountable and directly take profit of what they earn. If the product does well that quarter, engineers should be rewarded. Something to keep them working on a great product rather than catastrophically forgetting.

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That works in sales, where one salesperson runs the whole engagement and can clearly claim responsibility for the revenue and thus be directly compensated with a proportion of it.

But in engineering you need people to be thinking big picture, thinking collaboratively, taking risks, doing long term development, cleaning up technical debt. If you overly tie compensation to product revenue, you risk incentivizing your entire engineering staff toward short-term bolt-on-the-feature thinking.

What about infrastructure teams? Not all work is product work.

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