Economic Incentives
Something for my next employment contract: if it remains necessary for me to work at some large threshold above normal for more than 3 weeks in a row, I get an automatic bonus in the paycheck. This idea came to mind as part of the wrapup for our phase 1 deployment. This phase has been a beast – since December and up until just a few weeks ago, our whole project team was consistently wracking up work weeks in the 55 to 60 and up range. Software professionals expect that once in a while; it’s an accepted necessary evil to hit “crunch time” and work a bit harder. To do it for as long as our team did it, though, speaks of a team’s commitment to making the impossible happen, and is an expression of just how near impossible what we pulled off was. High personal cost, to us individually and to our families. Low corporate cost: there’s no financial indicator that any of this happened, since we’re all salaried. Salaried does imply a bit of leeway for the corporation, hence setting the performance bonus out after a lengthy period of overtime, rather than at the first bit. The idea is to remind somebody who runs the purse strings that this isn’t the way things should work. I’m a bit cynical: corporations learn best, I believe, when someone looks at cost versus benefit. It’s hard to quantify personal cost…. it’s a lot easier to quantify dollar cost. So it makes some amount of economic sense to make the picture clearer by assigning a dollar value to the personal impact.
Add comment June 25th, 2004