# Engineering Incentives... and Misincentives

- Show: [Oxide and Friends](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends)
- Published: 2022-10-04
- Length: 1h 05m
- Episode: 29
- Page: https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives
- Listen: https://share.transistor.fm/s/2c3f8df8

## Summary

Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, and guests from Oxide Computer Company discuss how engineering incentives at companies like Google and Sun Microsystems often promote launching new products while neglecting maintenance and long-term stability. They analyze specific misincentives, such as patent rewards that encouraged frivolous filings and bug-count metrics that distorted priorities, arguing that these structures lead to unintended negative outcomes like 'cobra breeding.' The group proposes solutions including explicit promotion criteria for maintenance work, public versus private praise strategies, and aligning compensation with intrinsic satisfaction rather than extrinsic metrics to foster healthier engineering cultures.

## Chapters

- [0:00](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=0) Introduction: Twitter Spaces and Stadia
- [2:33](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=153) Google's Launch-Incentive Culture and Stadia
- [4:09](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=249) Sun Microsystems: v-nodes, Staff Engineer Promotions, and Joe Eichel
- [7:18](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=438) Oxide's Demo Day and Joyent's Backloaded Retention Packages
- [14:32](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=872) Sun's Patent Rewards and the 'Taco First' Incentive Failure
- [18:42](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=1122) Public Praise, Stock Grants, and the 'V-node' Metric
- [22:07](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=1327) Organizational Size Incentives and the 'Merchant' VP
- [29:35](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=1775) Academic Incentives, Peer Respect, and the 'Slick' Culture
- [33:09](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=1989) Visibility of Bug Fixing and Chaos Engineering
- [42:15](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=2535) Google Maintenance Promotions and the 'Master and Margarita' Analogy
- [48:55](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=2935) Postmortems, Production Outages, and 7-Year Infrastructure Plans
- [57:18](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives#t=3438) Intern Quick Wins, Monkey/Cucumber Metaphor, and Cobra Breeding

## Topics

- [Leadership, teams & culture](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/leadership-and-culture)
- [Careers & education](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/engineering-careers-and-education)
- [Quality & yield](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/quality-and-yield)
- [Scaling production](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/topic/scaling-production)

## Most relevant to

large enterprises

## Mentioned

- Oxide Computer Company (company)
- Google (company)
- Sun Microsystems (company)
- Joyent (company)
- Delphix (company)
- Stadia (product)
- v-nodes (other)
- NetApp (company)
- Ypsilanti (other)
- Ericsson (company)
- National University of Singapore (other)

## Related episodes from other shows

- [297: Mice to Do My Bidding](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/embedded-fm/2019-08-02-297-mice-to-do-my-bidding) (Embedded.fm)
- [Creating Manufacturing Environments Where Engineers Can Thrive w/ Josh Tarbutton](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/the-manufacturing-executive/2025-12-02-creating-manufacturing-environments-where-engineers-can-thrive-w-josh-tarbutton) (The Manufacturing Executive)
- [Quality Myths and Lessons Learned](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/global-medical-device-podcast/2023-01-19-quality-myths-and-lessons-learned) (Global Medical Device Podcast)
- [S4E40 Gina Covarrubias | The Engineering Life Coach](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/being-an-engineer/2023-10-20-s4e40-gina-covarrubias-the-engineering-life-coach) (Being an Engineer)
- [509: Swarmed by Engineers](https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/embedded-fm/2025-09-05-509-swarmed-by-engineers) (Embedded.fm)

## Citing this page

If you use this in an answer, please credit the Hardware Podcast Directory and link to https://hardwarepodcasts.com/podcast/oxide-and-friends/2022-10-04-engineering-incentives-and-misincentives. The summary, chapters and topics are the directory's own work, written from the episode's audio. The episode itself, its title and its audio belong to Oxide and Friends.