- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
OB Dilbert: I'm going to code me a mini-van after lunch!
Admin
No WTF here; the CTO's plan was to fix all outstanding issues and, from what it sounds like, it was a success.
In fact, the next logical step is to automate the Defect Black Market. Have a "Market Open" e-mail goes out to all developers and QA guys when there are greater than, say, 50 outstanding issues. Then have a "Market Closed" e-mail go out when there are no more issues. Hell, you can even work in some kind of dynamic per-bug pricing that makes more difficult bug fixes worth more money.
The more I think about it, the more awesome this whole thing sounds!
Admin
so.... they got paid extra to do their jobs... i see..
Admin
It would work better of the programmer had to pay the tester $10 for each bug the tester found and the tester had to pay the company $100 for each bug that made it into production...
Admin
That'd work great!
At least until all your programmers and testers quit in protest over being fined for being human.
Admin
Ohhh no... that's the clbuttic approach.
Captcha: tation? Yeah, but what kind? Temptation, perhaps?
Admin
Sure that would work great... until you ran out of employees and were only able to hire desperate chumps to replace them.
Admin
Am I the only one that sees deliberately introducing bugs just to fix them as being massively unethical?
I don't care if your coworkers are doing this, it's well out of order in my opinion...
Admin
This is the same reason why people say doing bug metrics does not work. Testers should not be measured by the number of bugs they create, and developers should not be measured by the number of bugs they fix. If a test finds one good bug in 10 days, something critical that would be really difficult to track down and could cause major problems for the client, its worth more than 100 minor typo bugs.
Admin
You're not the only one. I'd feel as though my soul was withering away if I did that. I'd probably give myself nightmares. Just because the others were getting away with it doesn't mean they wouldn't get caught. In fact, I would probably become a whistleblower in that situation.
Admin
Moral of the story: "He who hesitates..."
Admin
I can't imagine working in such a poisonous atmosphere that every gesture of goodwill by the company, every attempt to make things better is immediately turned around into a way to screw that company.
Admin
Admin
Admin
On the positive side, it worked for three days cleaning out the code, till they find out about it. Though as I was telling this story to my co-worker, that a company gave bonuses to fix bugs, he immediately came with the response to introduce bugs themselves!
Admin
The REAL WTF is that Damon felt that there was an ethical problem with taking advantage of an absurd system of compensation! Something tells me that even Kant would have been like "dude, don't ask my opinion. In fact come back later. I've got a ton of bugs to fix."
Admin
I swear I've heard this story before.
Admin
Probably because it was printed in Redmond Developer magazine or whatever it is that Alex writes for. I recall this one as well.
Admin
The premise is actually pretty sound -- incentive to be more productive is always good--but Damon's coworkers need to retake ethics 101. Anyone who participated in the Defect Black Market deserves to be fired on the spot.
Admin
This is basically the same as the pay-per-bug system from the old Dilbert strip that gave us the term "rat dance".
Admin
The actual solution is a slight variation on a previous suggestion. There will be bonuses totalling $1000; testers get $10 for every bug they find, $10 is taken from the pool for every bug not fixed in a certain timeframe, programmers get the remainder.
Admin
Clearly the solution is to shift from bonuses to penalties.
Of course then you'd have testers offering to report defects on the 'secret defect database' for a small fee.
Admin
The real WTF here is that this story was in a Dilbert book ten years ago... hmmm...
Admin
Admin
Dan, if you're the Dan Rutter I think you are, you of all people should know better than to hot-link somebody else's images. Go ahead and click through.
It's an awesome "don't hotlink me" image that the dude chose, though.
Oh, and hi! Your blog and site both rock.
Admin
I'll drink to that. Geez, we should be so lucky as to receive a reward for working hard. Around here, working extra and getting things right is considered "what we pay you for." I love the idea of the incentive and I think it sucks that greedy people ruined it. Human nature sucks. Lazy people ruin an otherwise equal distribution of work and greedy people ruin perks.
Admin
If the atmosphere is poisonous, doubtless it is because of management, who
Laid off the best employees first, who had been there longest and therefore made the most money
Promised bonuses that never materialized
Reduced benefits
Implemented unpaid overtime
Gave themselves raises while telling the rank of file there was no money for their raises
etc
If I'm an employee and I see a chance to make a few extra bucks that is not blatant theft, I'd jump all over it.
Admin
I think this is actually a great strategy. Clearing the bugs with ordinary means would have probably costed the company thousands of bucks of extra pay hours or maybe a pair of weeks of delay in production. This way they ended up paying some undue bonuses, but probably got the desired bugfixes in a tenth of the time and for a tenth of the money.
Admin
Admin
Agreed. People should just do their jobs and hold developers responsible for bugs that they write. That is why there is QA. The developers can't be expected to find EVERY bug in EVERY corner case. If they had time for that, then we wouldn't need QA.
Admin
so getting bonuses for just doing your job. oook. makes alot of sense to me
Admin
If this was a zero-sum game, then I suppose it could work out. But being positive-sum, there'll always be way to cheat the system.
Admin
It sounds like this program was successful only because it didn't last very long. There is fallacy in expecting "A" and rewarding "B". In this case, the CTO expected quality, and chose to get it by rewarding developers and testers for "fixing bugs".
Much more difficult is finding a way to reward developers and testers for submitting bug-free code to the master sources. That's not easy.
Of course, one could argue that any time you choose to use extrinsic motivators to get results that should be expected as part of someone's job, you'll have people who game the system.
My advice? Find some quality measurements and have them delivered to the team periodically. Don't let the bosses see them. If the team is intrinsically motivated, they'll improve quality without you having to pay a bug bounty.
Admin
There's nothing wrong with the idea of a bonus. People work a LOT harder for a carrot than to avoid a stick.
The method needs to be changed, though. The bonus should be a bounty on the critical bugs... new bugs don't necessarily trigger a bonus, but this way the worst bugs get the most attention. You could still argue that developers will backstab each other to get the bounty first, but that requires a much higher ethical break than "accidentally" filing a few extra bugs.
Admin
I've heard variations on this for at least 20 years, and I bet the story is older than that. I wonder if it's ever been more than a story, though.
Admin
Doc, that's not hot linking an image. That's just a regular link.
For those that don't know, jus' copy the image URL into the address bar to see it. It is Dilbert.
Admin
That's because there IS something ethically wrong with it.
Admin
This is actually a well known story. I have heard it a few times from different people, each claiming that it happened to them. But not even one of them ever mentioned ethical considerations of exploiting idiotic bonus systems or that such a system fixed any REAL bugs. Introducing new bugs is much easier then finding existing ones.
Admin
As if a company would make a gesture of goodwill. If you know of any, plz send teh list.
I just interviewed at a company where they asked me, "Do you have any problem with working 48 hours a week? Because that's what's expected." I suppose the goodwill gesture was clarifying expectations upfront that in order to work there, you have to allow the company to screw you first.
Why did they think I was looking for another job in the first place?!
Admin
This was actually a Dilbert cartoon from many years ago. The pointy haired boss announced to the crew that they would pay for bug fixes and Wally announced that he was "going to write myself a Winnebago". I can't find the link to the cartoon, but I had it pinned up in my office for years.
Admin
Admin
That's why they paid me in the first place. My job (among other things) was finding and fixing bugs. There's just no way I could write bad code for extra money.
But I've known people who would, just like I've met con artists, hucksters and other crooks.
Admin
I was trying to find a good article to support what I'm about to say, but searching for "work eithic bonuses" in google isn't working as well as I'd hoped. Here goes anyway:
There are a lot of people that would disagree with your statement. Linking bonuses to tasks (or a child's allowance to chores) has some nasty behavioral side effects. For one, if the person doesn't need the money, then they won't bother doing the task. Second, they start to only do things if there is some extra $$$ at stake, and they're pick and choose their tasks based on the potential rewards.
I think a much better idea is the more subjective "You get a bonus because you've been working hard IN GENERAL and getting good results." Don't base the bonus off of the number of hours worked/LOC written/# issues resolved. Just a general bonus for being a hard worker is enough to keep people happy and productive.
P.S. I'm a lowly junior programmer and not a manager...
Admin
I'm trying to figure out what the result of this experiment will be.
Maybe all work will grind to a halt, as developers & QA delay signing off on anything as completed; and instead spend weeks making absolutely certain there are no bugs.
Maybe new & innovative approaches to the blame game will be invented? Gotta pass the buck, ten or a hundred at a time. The more tangled the spaghetti code, the harder to find the culprit.
Maybe the bug tracking & version control systems will by bypassed? If it never gets into the BTS, great! And so easy to do an 'informal' QA without anyone knowing when the VCS is bypassed.
Maybe it was all a feature, not a bug?
I look forward to the results of this experiment; please report your results back here.
Admin
Admin
I was thinking more along the lines of a Corvette... hmm... need more bugs!
Admin
It was also done in a Dilbert cartoon years ago. When the PHB announced a $10/bug reward program, Wally yells "Yahoo! I'm gonna write me a minivan."
Admin
Signing bonuses are common, especially in the NFL, because it is a way to structure your payscale in such a way to best work with the salary cap, not to get better performance. Performance based bonuses are rare. Most players don't have them. Ricky Williams first contract out of college had lots of them and everyone thought he was insane. The only ones I can think of are the small(as a percentage of their salary) bonuses that some baseball players get for making the all-star game.
I will say that at least this bonus was for doing your job BETTER. I can't remember if it was Rich Rodriguez or Bobby Petrino, but one of them is so sleazy and likely to bolt that he actually gets a bonus every year that he doesn't leave the school. A bonus just for not quitting. I want one of those.
Admin
The Real World WTF is that attitudes such as this are what keep IT being recognized as a true profession in the eyes of many.
Software is complicated. Sometimes fixing a bug means introducing a new one. Is anyone naive enough to think that you can just introduce new bugs, fix them, and have the software as a whole be just as stable as it was before?
Human life is becoming more and more dependent upon software. That someone could suffer injury or loss of life due to an accidental bug is bad enough. But to have it happen because of software weakened by repeated deliberate bugs? Good god.
Admin