> I remember being in shouting matches with our signal integrity team about among other things, how many capacitors we needed. These tiny devices evened out the power of the system, but they wanted far too many to be added to allow the design cheap and easy to build
> Meanwhile I was waking up at 4AM on most days, in full-stress-insomnia. Sometimes I would just give up on sleep and go into work at that early hour, and while there, sometimes run into other stressed-out engineers who also could not sleep. I had shaved as much time as I could possibly get off the schedule, and a little cost. A $25K bonus was out of the question at this point, but $10K or more, still in the running.
> Because manufacturing, as discussed, was not on the secret bonus program, did not even know it existed, and had very little incentive to speed up the rework. As far as they were concerned the project was slightly ahead of schedule, so why rush the job and make another mistake? More time ticked by. They actually did make another mistake anyway, and mounted incorrect rams a second time, which I remember being really mad about.
> Meanwhile, our sister project had managed to minimize their cost target and beat the target schedule of their project, such that each member of that team received the full $25,000.
Sounds to me like the bonus program was working exactly as intended. OP got into shouting matches with other stakeholders to trim overly cautious expenses. He and his teammates voluntarily worked far outside regular working hours. Both him and his sister team succeeded in delivering a successful project ahead of time, with lower costs, and were ultimately tripped up only by the incompetence of other teams that had minimal bonus incentives.
I've noticed a huge difference between orgs where people have skin in the game, and orgs where people don't. People with skin in the game, have a real fire under their ass. It's inspiring to see how much they are able to get done, and how quickly. At orgs where people don't have skin in the game, I spend half my time sitting in meetings, discussing what doc we should write next, what format we should use for the doc, and when to schedule the next meeting to review that doc. It's as though people are more interesting in impressing one another and putting in facetime, rather than actually getting stuff done. In fact, I've noticed that people often add a net-negative value to many projects - their urge to add their 2 cents and make their impact felt, results in goalposts getting constantly shifted and launches getting continually delayed.
Is it possible for a badly designed bonus program to produce disastrously bad results? Definitely. But there has to be a better way to give people more skin in the game, when it comes to doing their job as effectively as possible.