What you’re saying is a virtue in peacetime and a sin in wartime. Precisely the argument the author is trying to make
Definitely not. Heroism is nearly the opposite, in that it wants heroes to be significant, not the work.
Let's just level set for a second:
* Peer bonuses are a fixed $175 and spot bonuses are usually under $1000, and pretty much always under $5000.
* The coveted "feats of engineering award" (or whatever they changed the name to this time), which has the highest prestige factor of any of the internal awards, is $2000 cash or a trip somewhere.
* A senior SWE at Google makes about $300k. A Staff SWE makes $400-500k. An entry-level SWE makes $150-200k.
What this means is that the only REAL reward on offer (other than a token amount of cash and a serotonin-inducing certificate) is a promotion. Promotions almost always come when you launch products (actually, they changed the benchmark to "landing" products, which seems to always happen about 6-12 months after launch after the bugs are worked out).
Launches at Google are almost always significant efforts - either in terms of engineering around the company's arcane systems that are changing underneath you or in terms of getting through all of the process checks that ensure your service is "googly." Further, to go from a "launch" to a "landing" is mostly a political process: you have to convince enough of your management team that you have met some arbitrary milestone that indicates a stable product. As such, people are not too happy to take significant technical risks if they involve spending more than a few months on a project - if you want to get promoted, wasting time on something that might fail is bad. Why would you want to "land" a risky product when you can "land" something that is already on the roadmap?
Additionally, Google offers pretty much no promotion credit to engineers for "prospecting" - what I will call the process of identifying products that should go on the roadmap. That means that if you go out and do this sort of work, you are actively hindering your career: if you go prospecting, you are going to spend months not "landing" things. Conversely, prospecting seems to be a very good way to get peer and spot bonuses.
This is why Google provides no real benefits for taking technical risks. The only real reward is promotion, and promotions come mostly from following the roadmap, not from rocking the boat. The other awards and bonuses are basically toys by comparison.
And maybe well paid titles, but where one couldn't hire more people, one just got paid better? To mitigate over hiring?
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Or what are your other thoughts, about how to solve the problems you noticed? ... In addition to:
> promotion credit to engineers for "prospecting"
I understand there are some exceptions: sometimes during outages/emergencies, you do want folks to fix issues ASAP regardless of how long they are up.
interesting! it's precisely the point made at the end of The Caine Mutiny.