There was an old thedailywtf post about how a company thought they'd incentivize fidning and fixing bugs. Suddenly every engineer had a QA buddy, and they'd make like 50 spelling errors, which QA will find, and enigneering will quickly resolve. They took down the bounty within a week.
That might have been this Dilbert comic:
The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
(There may be some question as to whether these events actually occurred or not, but there are similar examples of documented pest-control campaigns (and others) on the Wikipedia page[0] where similar things happened).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
Yeah I've been looking into the cobra effect in the current youtube adblocking thingy... It certainly got me to use primarily adnausium which fixes the problem since ads are served, just... you know... maliciously clicked on.
I felt bad for leaving so soon, but good for not having cost them a dime.
when I have made large improvements like the article/blog describes, I am pulled off of that and put on something far worse, immediately, except without the autonomy. "why can't you succeed here?"
And who's going to fire you for this?
The people telling you to roll this out slowly are doing so mostly to protect themselves from having their incompetence exposed and to appear useful. Protecting them will help them steal your credit and will get them promoted.
more likely, the top of the company is just as incompetent but has lucked / gamed their way into promotions anyways.
So this engineer throwing his managers under the bus may be good for the company in theory, but to the senior management this is a red flag. they don't want engineers who do this - they want engineers who give credit to their managers. if they promoted this engineer and fired everyone else, he'd come for them next.
Of course if everybody quietly agrees that this company is a suitable vehicle for their incompetence, then it's a bad idea to address this. And some companies definitely are.
> the top of the company should love because a) you saved them a ton of money
The top of the company is probably already rich. Being richer is great, but one of the few things rich people generally won't burn to run the money-making engine hotter is their own sense of prestige and entitlement.
> b) you identified a pile of incompetence in their company.
Yes, and you told that fact to people who were already responsible for identifying that, which means you just told them that they are incompetent too. And that transitively works its way all the way up the org chart.
You would make the whole chain of command lose face and do so in front of the rest of the chain of command. It would be career suicide.
Every manager would rather silently waste money than be made to look like a fool. Because the money comes out of the business's bank account, not theirs, but looking stupid affects their personal reputation.
Let's say 5 or 10 years later you're applying to a job where one of these upper-level people now work. How do you want them to remember you? The know-it-all who wasn't a team player and kind of an asshole? Or the engineer who gets things done and has demonstrably shown to land impact and value, an engineer the exec would consider lucky to have?
Some of you will say you wouldn't want to work for one of these executives again. But people change, incentives change, the environment changes. Have you ever made a technical decision you later regretted?
And maybe you don't work for them. Maybe you're applying to a different company where someone knows these previous upper-level management folks and they ask about you. How do you want that recommendation to come across? "That engineer was an asshole.", "That engineer was amazing, I wish we could have kept them. We made a big mistake by not trying to keep them.".
I've definitely missed out on work sometimes due to having a reputation for being about as subtle as a brick to the face with no lemon, but I've also -got- certain pieces of work as a direct result of being criticised and somebody who heard the criticism thinking "if he annoyed that person that way, he's probably serious about doing the right thing."
I would, however, suggest that probably I would've done better overall if I'd toned it down a bit.
About once a year or so one of the stand-out engineers that had the weight of the world on their shoulders would get burnt out and frustrated enough to do exactly what you suggest above.
Literally everyone would just look around awkwardly, leave the meeting and never talk about it again. All of middle management already know all of this, the only way they keep their jobs is by never talking about it, and just ignoring anyone that does. The VPs and President only know what those below them feed them.
"hi everyone, I wanted to walk you how we got to a half-a-million dollar savings, basically I spent a day looking at how terrible the original infrastructure was deployed and removed a code test feature that was causing the problems. This was just complete oversight from every aspect of the development, management, testing, and everything. Overall this code is as bad as it can possibly get, and we just launched it. And basically I was told not to say any of this because it makes everyone look bad, so I was to roll this out gradually to make it seem like managers were doing some sort of work."
Then drop the mic and walk off stage.
Honestly the amount of give-a-fucks I would have lost would have been a lot. And this is coming from someone who's done this for almost 2 decades and cares about his job because bills to pay, kids to feed.