Reward or not, or how

It depends.

There is a story Thanks or No Thanks told be Joel Spolsky, happened between him and Noah Weiss.
I just get these few ideas:

• Noah not only provided the idea, but also with precise charge for each AD, when Joel had no idea;
• Noah implemented the first draft - sadly, this might be the least value-add and why Noah switch from Software Designer to Product Manager;
• Joel thought others might think: a software business is basically an idea factory ... Why pay twice? (You know what I think? I just know my own thoughts, and not really.)
  
• Joel himself thought:
• I felt we needed to do something else to express our gratitude. Should we ... ? We were stumped.
• And what about everybody else at Fog Creek?
• How do you pay employees based on performance when performance is so hard to quantify? (Woo! Really Hard? Yes, I know, pretty hard to reward!)
• The very act of rewarding workers for a job well done tends to make them think they are doing it solely for the reward;
• We decided to give Noah 10,000 shares of stock -- conditional ... our stock is hard to value ... (Emm... Conditional and Hard to value ...)
• Noah seemed pleased (Or negotiation is expected?) Google made him a better offer ... Thanks for the summer, Noah. We are keeping an empty office here in case you change your mind. (No Thanks and Fxxx Off!)
  

Anyway, it's still appreciated that Joel shared the story.

Why Google Wave failed - answered on Quora

The story about Lars Rasmussen told by an anonymous user is quite interesting. Copied below:

I did not directly work on Wave but here's the story to the best of my knowledge:

Lars Rasmussen was getting ready to leave Google and Google was highly motivated for him to stay on board so they bent a lot of rules and handed him the Google Wave project with very little oversight or control from the Google HQ.

Part of the deal initially was that Wave would be compensated much like a startup, base salaries were supposed to be low but with heavy performance linked bonuses which would have made the Wave team rich upon Wave's success.

During the course of negotiations and building the Wave product, the "heavily reward for success" part of the equation remained but the "punish upon failure" got gradually watered down into irrelevance, making the entire project a win-win bigger proposition.

Because large parts of the performance bonus were tied to intermediate performance goals, the Wave team was more motivated to hit deadlines than to ship good product. Product began to suffer as the team pushed to fill in a feature checklist on time.

The Wave team also largely dogfooded the product only internally within the Wave team who were already familiar with the basic paradigms and any outside user testing that demonstrated problems was carefully marginalized.

Lars was also a true believer and genuinely did believe Wave would become a massive success.

Upon Wave's cancellation, Lars stayed around just long enough to make sure his team was "adequately" compensated and then immediately decamped to Facebook.

In short, Google was experimenting with a drastically new model in an attempt to retain key talent and ended up getting the incentives so perversely aligned that it both directly contributed to a failed product and also compensated that failure more than what a moderate success would have been.

Promotion Systems

After read Promotion Systems and Promotion Systems Redux, it seems the best choice is to be the first few person in a team or organization, if you cannot make or join a startup company. Then, you could be one of the seniors, who can set/influence the rules for their own benefit. So, just take the risk you could bear, and be the first few ones at corresponding different levels.

There seems no better systems, or again "no silver bullet".
If the rules are very clear, then the rules will be gamed.
This might be the reason, why the rules are blurred in most aging systems. But, rules are still there, this is called 潜规则 in Chinese, and finally dominate the system partly or completely ...

Stanford Prison Experiment

Stanford Prison Experiment

I knew Stanford Prison Experiment by some articles in Chinese listing it as one of the examples long ago. But, maybe they are all paperback or don't provide a reference/link. They just mention the experiment and go on with their own arguments.

This post, Startup Recruiting and the Standford Prison Experiment, caught my attention and made me thought, by linking to Wikipedia, and quoting text from Wikipedia:

The results of the experiment argue in favor of situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities.

Although, I am not going to read the original report or materials. It just supports my suspect: it is the position/role makes people behaved so differently. But still leaves a question: how about the very start, before the the situations/positions/roles been set? Or, how do these things been setup?

It's natural to think that, everyone sets their own position/role, then competes and adjusts, and eventually forms a dynamically balanced system. But I'm not fully convinced.

It's said there are two fundamental assumptions (by physicists):

• Everything should be reasonable
• Everything should be determined

But you can only choose one, for you have "reasonable", then "random" or "free will" cannot be avoided; if you have "determined", then not everything is guaranteed to be "reasonable".

Most of physicists might choose the first one, so that nothing can be faster that light, and also "GOD plays dice" - even if you get all the inputs, you cannot know the outputs for sure.

And I'm also wondering, if there is a random seed for real life, just like we have in the computer world. Or, the rule has randomness inside itself?

Back to real life, the discussion on Hacker News is also interesting:

If you give an interview you cannot pass, how do you distinguish between the quality of different correct responses?

Because the candidate is able to explain their answer at your level.
That's how you know they actually know what they're talking about - the ability to explain it to their grandmother.

Using this same principle though we can argue that someone who knows nothing about brain surgery, such as myself, is qualified to hire brain surgeons based on whether they can explain how to do it in a way that I personally think makes sense to me. I might like to commend myself for being able to hire brain surgeons by virtue of my own ignorance, but it seems to me that the flaw here is I don't really know whether what he explained is true, or if it just sounds good.

 

So basically you hire the best bull shitter?