My colleague regaled me with this, and how he'd rewritten it after learning how slow it was. Got it down to, IIRC, probably 15 minutes - all data imported, cleaned, logged, etc. This was normal, basic SQL stuff - nothing fancy. It was regarded as black magic, and "this can't be right, you're missing something, etc" that went on for more weeks.
This was one of a dozen stories like this. BUT... the company was established, and with enough people "doing" stuff, they would still grow (if only by brute force and adding people).
I suggested "perhaps if people had more motivation to improve their skills - like... maybe some profit sharing?"
"THEY HAVE THAT ALREADY!" he laughed back. It caused a lot of friction between the 2-3 competent engineers and the ... ~10-12 others - because the competent ones all just looked at the 'profits' being wasted by the others on the team. And, FWIW, it wasn't a lot anyway. I think an average 'profit sharing' for most rank and file was perhaps... $2-$3k/year. Might have been more had they been able to execute faster and grow market share with faster turnaround time, but... even $5k 'bonus' - it's nice, but for someone already making $80k+, this isn't really going to move the needle enough to motivate people to get remarkably better at their jobs.
It may (and possibly) does work in some situations, but that was the most recent one I had some connection with. It seemed a de-motivator for the few competent people on the team.
In my experience, initiative in even its most short-sighted forms (such as 'encounter problem, see straightforward way to prevent problem from recurring, take action to implement this solution') is quite unusual. True 'long range' initiative, where someone spontaneously identifies desirable but as-yet unreached goals and invents and implements non-obvious plans to attain them, is incredibly rare. No matter how you try to incentivize it most people just don't work like that.
What companies need to do (IMHO) is to recognize this aptitude when it does show up, and give these individuals the freedom to implement their improvements. This will matter more to them than any normal amount of money.
This was really sort of spread around the org. The PM in charge could have clarified up front "average workload is 30k records, and expected turnaround time is 4hr". The dev(s) involved could have recognized there was missing clarity, and asked. This is less about "you have to go learn SQL" specifically, and more just recognizing communication gaps in general, and working to address.
My colleague who implemented the "faster ingest" process was viewed by PM and others as interfering and threatening to others. He'd only been there 18 months, how could he possibly know better than DevX, who's been with the company 5 years, and knows the problem space so well??
With respect to the 'rare' part, it feels relatively natural to me, and to some others I know. It's at least partially the nature of doing 'problem solving' across multiple disciplines for decades. Having the political ability to get those 'long range' fixes/changes past the vetting of others, who will end up having some of their plans challenged, is the much harder part. But... I've not had a good fit in traditional/normal corporate orgs for many years either.
Profit sharing won't achieve anything if you are bad at filtering bad hires.
The point of profit sharing/stock comp is to get a better pipeline of applicants. It's them up to the company to filter adequately (remember: everyone whose mother told them they were "good at computers" because they play videogames all day applied at Google). A company that doesn't do stock comp is not serious in my book.
"A players hire A players, B players hire C players. Do you get it?" [0]
[0] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=How_to_Hire_Insa...
A friend of mine tried to implement profit sharing to reward employees and to stop theft at his restaurant. Basically paying out a monthly bonuses based on how well the restaurant did that month, but which would go down by the amount of theft.
Theft actually increased because no one really understood the bonus program (even though the bonuses would have paid more than the theft!)
I guess what I am saying, there are no easy answers and a lot of the most 'logical' incentives are only really incentivizing to a certain demographic.
Amazon caught a lot of bad press for their wages a while ago despite giving warehouse employees equity-based compensation. They got a lot of good press by ditching the stock-based comp and simply raising cash wages, because that’s what headlines wanted to see. The workers may have lost out in the process, but the wage number is higher now.
Concern trolls fussing about all the pitfalls ignore that no system is perfect, you can't satisfy everyone (clearly!), and any and all efforts to decrease today's ridiculous CEO-to-grunt compensation ratio are to be applauded.
even at my own $EMPLOYER there have been issues with the stock price variability such that people have a hard time knowing what their actual income is and if they're overspending/committing. ie it's very risky to take on a fixed monthly bill like a mortgage if your income is tied to something variable.
Make the data about what multiplier of base pay you paid out in the company performance variable component in the past few years and the upper and lower bounds of employee performance variable component and one gets the idea of how much they can make for sure and how much more they can potentially make it all goes well.
It might also be true that a lot of the products and services of those businesses simply are not valuable enough to be viable without extremely low labor costs.
Institute some level of profit sharing. This gives workers skin in the game but there's much more flexible and responsive then simple wage hikes. It's also closer to cooperative voluntary collaboration