> You can't hire smart motivated people and then be surprised when they figure out to optimize for their rewards.

Never said that. I don’t have a solution. Well I have a partial solution, but not complete:

Reward all team members equally for the performance of the team, or even the company. For instance: the pie is divided into 3 pieces: company, team, and individual performance. Candy is given out based on performance of both.

It doesn’t fix the hackable metrics issue, but when people collaborate the side effects are better than when they think of their own promotions, and worse when they’re competing against their direct peers for a fixed bucket of candy per team. Such incentives are directly opposing collaboration between the very people that need to collaborate the most.

According to your other comment, then, a company that "lands stable customer-loved products" would be a "hotbed of nepotism" that people shouldn't work for.

Nonsense - you can have documented metrics which are known and tied to performance.

For example:

* Require features to be launched for a period of time rather than in development or shoved out the door a week before perf

* Have metrics for customer satisfaction and oncall pages be incorporated

Etc.

Nonsense were a lot of your replies in my experience :), this "measure everything" is very much another cargo cult. Software engineering is complex, people are complex, thinking you can come with a true metric and who doesn't have it doesn't know what they're doing is the nonsense in my world view.

Have excited engineers, pay them well, have them work on something that is aligned with their career & deliver value to their customers, they don't really need much more than that. All the rest is simply trying to "processi-ze" what is a human