It's interesting that the author does not even consider the impact of incentives on performance. As Charlie Munger famously said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." It is true that collaboration becomes increasingly difficult as the team grows in size, but collaboration is not the fundamental problem. To manage a large team, the real challenge is to design incentives that properly reward those who produce and perform, and penalize those who don't. People respond to incentives (yes, it is a tautology, and that is precisely the point).
What kind of incentives are possible in your average tech work environment? A raise? A bonus? Raises usually come with more responsibility. I'm not familiar with tech companies doing bonuses.
Money is the sledgehammer of incentives. Above a reasonable amount of pay, it's overkill and makes lots of collateral problems. The really effective incentives are status based and situational to the group dynamic
Starts with how you evaluate employees for bonuses and promotion. Do you evaluate people on the impact of what was delivered? How fast they delivered feature work? The quality level of what they delivered? How well they worked with others?
The answers to basic questions like that already starts to shape behavior. If you pay zero attention to how people behave, and only look at impact of what was delivered you may promote people who optimize for their own work, but make others miserable. If you don't properly weight quality, especially now with AI code gen, you'll promote people who move fast break more things than is reasonable.
We can easily find examples of suboptimal behavior that arises out of poorly shaped rewards incentives at companies. Empire building is one behavior that is the result of managers getting promoted based on headcount. Stack ranking can and has led to people limiting collaboration with peers because someone has to fail in order for someone else to get a favorable rating. Or people avoid riskier work because failure can put you on the hot seat.
Sure, you did a great job on that last project, we've added 8 hours of PTO for you. No, you can't take it any time soon, we're far too busy for you to take any time off
FWIW at this job I don't feel like PTO days are a limitation. The limitation is my ability to plan and execute well, and I appreciate the flexibility of not having to deal w/ counting or thinking in terms of days in that way.
I have a prescribed quantity of vacation. To be honest, I never think about it either, because I have more than I use. I guess when I leave, I'll get it paid out? Or take a 4 month vacation when I leave? I'd probably announce my intent to do that. In any case, I'm comforted by knowing that there is some quantity. But I guess I'm undercutting my own point here. PTO is probably not that motivating to me either.
yeah in my opinion this is the big question on whether you're getting screwed by unlimited PTO. But I don't manage other aspects of my finances so tightly, so it's kind of an "eh" for me.
> PTO is probably not that motivating to me either.
The issue is that systems don't account for the diversity in how people are motivated and what parts of systems they are sensitive to and how they are sensitive to them.
By default in the dominant culture, most systems come down to individual incentives for individual drive and shame dynamics for collective drive, and that covers a decent chunk of how people are motivated, but leaves out people who are motivated differently and actively harms people for whom these are paralyzing.
