> These realities lead to extreme focus on promotion vs product success --Me > We > Product/Users. I feel that the risk reward model in Corp-Tech is broken due to ever rising stock prices and lack of personal impact on your returns. Perhaps Corp-Tech should move to employee share buy back where employees must sacrifice some of their salary for equity or change equity to vest by a product related metric to connect the teams performance with the employee returns.
No. Fuck you, pay me, as the saying goes [1]. As a manager / VP, it is your responsibility to set the product vision and goals. Engineers can't build / sales can't sell a great product if prospective clients are not interested, like putting an art gallery online [2].
Additionally, having no personal stake in the product allows developers / engineers to be more objective and professional. This is a problem that most junior engineers will face at some point, and most senior engineers will easily recognize. You put so many hours and so much work into a new project that you start to make it part of your identity. You can see this in a few consumer products like the Xbox One launch, where Microsoft employees received special Xboxs that had "I MADE THIS" branded on the device [3].
But for most companies engineers and developers have very little influence over the product's specifications - they're simply asked to build a thing already specc'd to hell by PM's, VP's, legal, ADA, and other groups within your organization. So if the joint effort of all those groups results in the product failing before it even hits a developers' desk, why should their compensation be impacted?
The best way to tie development teams to the product is by offering bonuses when the product succeeds. But for some odd reason many companies don't want to do that.
No. Fuck you, pay me, as the saying goes [1]. As a manager / VP, it is your responsibility to set the product vision and goals. Engineers can't build / sales can't sell a great product if prospective clients are not interested, like putting an art gallery online [2].
Additionally, having no personal stake in the product allows developers / engineers to be more objective and professional. This is a problem that most junior engineers will face at some point, and most senior engineers will easily recognize. You put so many hours and so much work into a new project that you start to make it part of your identity. You can see this in a few consumer products like the Xbox One launch, where Microsoft employees received special Xboxs that had "I MADE THIS" branded on the device [3].
But for most companies engineers and developers have very little influence over the product's specifications - they're simply asked to build a thing already specc'd to hell by PM's, VP's, legal, ADA, and other groups within your organization. So if the joint effort of all those groups results in the product failing before it even hits a developers' desk, why should their compensation be impacted?
The best way to tie development teams to the product is by offering bonuses when the product succeeds. But for some odd reason many companies don't want to do that.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
[2]: http://paulgraham.com/worked.html
[3]: https://www.neowin.net/news/heres-the-best-look-yet-at-the-w...