I've been saying it for years - all roles should work somewhat like sales. Sales incentivizes work and productivity. The harder you work the more you may get paid off that sweet sweet commission. That isn't easy to do for engineering roles though. How do you quantify productivity in engineering? There are probably a few ways:
1. royalties for reusable code (you no longer receive this if you leave, incentivizing people to stay as your royalties stack up). Any time code you've worked on is reused you get % x (equivalent hourly wage when you wrote it) x (# of hours it took to write the first time around). Possibility of backfiring if people ramp up hours spent producing high value stuff to maximize that royalty. This also only works in a job that allows you to build a lot of tooling for the team or something like that.
2. royalties/bonuses per team every time that teams work is used. This only works in highly profitable businesses maybe like google - i.e. anytime your code that served an ad is used the team gets a portion of that money to distribute evenly to the team. This doesn't really incentivize anything except getting onto productive teams.
3. in a fair and just workplace some sort of bonus based on democratic vote/ranking system on who is the most valuable to the entire team instead of one single person deciding (the boss) haha! that would never work.
1. royalties for reusable code (you no longer receive this if you leave, incentivizing people to stay as your royalties stack up). Any time code you've worked on is reused you get % x (equivalent hourly wage when you wrote it) x (# of hours it took to write the first time around). Possibility of backfiring if people ramp up hours spent producing high value stuff to maximize that royalty. This also only works in a job that allows you to build a lot of tooling for the team or something like that.
2. royalties/bonuses per team every time that teams work is used. This only works in highly profitable businesses maybe like google - i.e. anytime your code that served an ad is used the team gets a portion of that money to distribute evenly to the team. This doesn't really incentivize anything except getting onto productive teams.
3. in a fair and just workplace some sort of bonus based on democratic vote/ranking system on who is the most valuable to the entire team instead of one single person deciding (the boss) haha! that would never work.
4. bounty on features or something like that?
I don't know, I wish there was a way though.