Developer Productivity: Why Some Incentives Fail

No matter how clearly we explain what we want, our system of rewards can undermine our efforts to improve.

Incentive structures are common in the workplace, whether intentional or not. But when we introduce measures to boost productivity, they nearly always have the opposite effect.

Not long ago, the industry tried to gamify the workplace to make it more engaging. But have you noticed that we’ve ended up making games more like work instead? Let’s explore productivity through the lens of gamification.

A Fun Diversion

Computer games can be a fun diversion, and a short time ago, businesses were told to gamify the workplace. People thought making work more like games, whether digital or physical, would increase engagement and motivation.

Instead of making work more engaging, gamification attempts to hide it behind a thin veil of competitive fun. In a strange turn of events, games have become more like this type of work. They now present an endless backlog of daily, weekly and monthly tasks you must complete to progress and level up. Taking time off is problematic as it means missing out on crucial experience points, and if you don’t put in extra hours, you fall behind.

Games now use rewards and punishments to drive your behavior, and they have become more addictive and less enjoyable. There’s even a term for the repetitive work you must put into these games to earn the rewards: “grinding.” The term dates back to the board-game era, but grinding has become a dominant mechanism in modern games as they compete for your time and attention.

Gamification

With this in mind, it’s worth revisiting the concept of gamifying the workplace. The original idea was to increase engagement by making the workplace more fun and motivating higher performance with league tables and achievements. This is misguided because work is fun, given the right circumstances. Employees thrive when they have a clear goal and the appropriate autonomy to act.

Gamification brings an additional risk: There’s a danger we’ll return to toilsome grinding as we emulate the mechanics of games in the workplace. Grinding is the worst work mode, as it encourages people to produce high-volume and low-value output in an era where quality is a substantial competitive advantage.

Productivity as Experience Points

When organizations and consultancies discuss developer productivity, they stray into hazardous territory. Introducing productivity measurement boosts attention on visible work, discourages vital enabling tasks that don’t receive credit and rewards heroes who save organizations from mythical beasts of their own creation.

For example, I worked for an organization in the health-care industry that performed manual deployments. Only two release engineers had access to production, so they were the only people who could put new software versions live. Even though deployments to pre-live environments were automated, the release engineers preferred a manual push to production.

Some interesting outcomes accompanied this grind culture. As you might expect, every deployment was challenged. Although automated pre-live deployments could be completed within minutes, the production deployment took two weeks. As the go-live approached, a series of issues would be caused by missed deployment steps or running steps out of order. These needed urgent handling and typically resulted in the release engineers working evenings and weekends.

The organization had fast, reliable, repeatable and secure deployments to the test and staging environments, and chaos moving the software into production. So what did it do?

In the month following each production deployment, the release engineers received overtime payments and the employee of the month award.

It happened every time, so the release engineers were incentivized to continue the chaos. They got top marks for grinding. They did the most overtime, closed the most issues, and were the busiest and most stressed-out employees. By many measures, they were highly productive, except all the activity was a waste.

Stop the Grind

If your organization rewards employees for grinding, either through gamification or by attempting to quantify “productivity,” there is no incentive to improve software delivery performance. In the real-life example, two people vigorously opposed any attempt to improve the deployment pipeline because it would strip them of financial rewards and companywide recognition.

In software delivery, routine, repetitive tasks should be the target of automation. Incentivizing people to waste time doing poorly what a computer can do faster and more accurately is a recipe for disaster. At its best, it’s economically foolish to pay a human to do toil work; at its worst, it invites instability and disaster. Meanwhile, crucial human tasks that are hard to measure earn no credit, despite providing the glue that keeps everything together.

Does your organization reward grinding? It might be time to identify areas where toilsome work results in rewards, or where invisible, enabling work is actively punished.