I see this practice on several teams, but I'm not sure if really works.
For me cause more problems because the team focuses his effort on the fight about the bug with QA and less to solve it.
Someone has used this strategy?
Money was collected for?
Camilo Martinez
Posted on • Updated on
Is it good or bad practice to make developers pay money for his bugs?
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Oldest comments (38)
I've never heard of money been collected. What I have seen happen is the dev been held responsible in a few ways:
Publicly shamed within a larger meeting and/or put on a wall of shame for the week/month
Developer's review and bonus were affected significantly
The developer was put on pager duty to wake up in the middle of the night and handle live-site issues.
Places like Amazon make every developer responsible for their own features and are put on pager duty for their feature
I don't think any company should be collecting money from their employees for bugs.
I have never seen this practice as company rule or politic, I think would be something illegal retain salary money. It's more like team's agreement.
But after read your answer, I prefer collect money than this first item, it's scary.
If this was a small amount of money in a way that was sort of "for fun", I think it would be okay. If it seriously impacted anyone's income I'd say it's bad practice for sure. All systems end up being optimized for and gamed and I really think this would be ripe for this sort of thing.
While maybe not one-to-one, this has Cobra Effect written all over it.
Yes I see it's a small amount of money, something symbolic.
I could see it not being a complete disaster if it was a token amount paid into a team lunch fund or as an occasional fundraising gimmick for charity or something but no it's still a terrible idea. People have debts you don't know about, it'll turn most prospective new hires off on principle, and like you've noticed it sets cultural priorities in ways that don't do much to help team cohesion.
I've done an "I broke the build" trophy before. That's all in good fun though, less about shame and more memento mori -- it's coming to you eventually. Plus, everyone has the same goal: to ensure the current holder keeps it as long as possible!
I'm pretty early into my career as a developer. I'm also pretty ambitious in my independent learning and my ideas for improving the application I work in.
Many of my experiments are beneficial. Others are interesting. Some are authentically bad, but I learn from them. Occasionally I push new ideas that, at first inspection from my coworkers, pass muster and make it into production before manifesting issues. Usually these issues are minor. Once or twice they are more significant.
We have decent test coverage, a fairly regimented pull request review, and qa process. If I, or a coworker, commit some bad code we identify a failure in the process and discuss it.
The idea of being penalized monitarily, or shamed publicly, or being subject to any punishment or retribution for making mistakes in good faith is so unacceptable to me that I can't even imagine my reaction.
Is this a real thing that people do?
Yes, it for real.
This industry pays too well for anyone to accept a job where a person is treated like that. I gotta ask the theoretical strawman developer who gets admonished for trying and failing, where your dignity at?
Yes, It's exactly why I have my doubts. It's not an error free profession.
I would no say know unless its a contract type job, and even then probably not. People make mistakes, keeping it light-hearted is best I think for work. Fostering a pleasant work environment is important as turnover in software is pretty costly.
If a person is a common offender then they need to fix the problem or be removed. That and raises should reflect performance.
\m/
I have not heard of that myself and find probably somewhere between doubtful and utterly wrong.
If very small amounts of money are collected (i.e. 1-2€) and they are used to buy pizza, beer or cake for a release, I would still find this approach doubtful, but could see a point to sharpen the view of everyone to good code and in the end it's used to have a small release party.
But as you wrote, this can distract from fixing the issue to either hiding mistakes or arguing if this should be accounted for. This is not very helpful for code quality, team morale or pretty much any other positive aspect.
Btw: was this introduced by a manager? How much does he or she pay per day to day mistake that happens? I think this counter question shows how absurd this is as management method.
It was mentioned by tech leader because QA report same mistake over and ever again (on differents screens).
They talked, the whole team and agre this "taxes":
Money collected wold be used for buy beer on December.
As the tech leader fee is double the price, it might be worth looking at, as the money goes into beer for the team in the end. An even softer approach would be to just give points and the person with the high score has to bake a cake in the end.
As long as this is done in a fun way with a little wink and not to but blame individual persons, it could work. As soon as it becomes a real punishment or could cost a developer a relevant part of the salary, it will get very serious and can cause more trouble than it actually solves (in my opinion).
I never came across such a "strategy" and I am a developer for almost 10 years now.
My opinion on this is clear: such a rule makes things worse and leaves personal evolvement behind!
What do you accomplish with it? Emotionally this causes more mental stress and pressure on the developers which is bad for their well-being (physical health and satisfaction with their work).
Also they will be focused on getting their stuff done without bugs first before helping others out => bad for the team and learning.
What you want to emotionally trigger in the developer are feelings of happiness when there are few bugs.
We do the following:
Bugs are tracked automatically due to Visual Studio Team Services (we can get statistics from there easily). For each iteration until deployment, every developer should not have caused more than 6 bugs. Exceptions are bugs because of unclear specs (this has to be handled in the team that they discuss it before starting dev next time). If this goal is reached, the gets rewarded with a dinner or some other team activities.
Important part: If the goal is not reached, there is no punishment!
This makes the whole team want to reach the goal but no one must be afraid of punishment for not reaching it and the communication between us is better than before.
I can't even comprehend this, so my two pence are simply: I would never work there.
It actually reminds me of Milgram's Experiment, at the least the blind experiment. "Shock some people if they're wrong".
Sounds like the developers would have a financial incentive not to innovate or improve anything at all.
Any workplace trying to publicly shame people in any way with swear jars, penalties for bugs or anything like that, does not deserve any respect. I would never work for a company so badly mismanaged.
Two golden rules of feedback:
Also bugs happen to everyone, it's stupid to punish anyone, or even give them negative feedback for it. Hell it's stupid to waste time figuring out who to "blame" for it.
Just fix the bug, try your best to avoid the same bug in the future, and see if there's anything you can do to improve your processes and ways of working to prevent that class of bugs from appearing in the future.
This is not normal at all. If it is anything, it's the opposite of normal. Please look out for a better team to work with.
It is one of the stupidest policies I can think of and only seems to be a way out of paying a bill.
If you ask a dev to add two numbers, most will present you with a solution. You'll have no bugs because complexity is so low.
If you ask a dev to do something that already exists they will probably use something that exists. You'll inherit all of the bugs of that thing (and there will be bugs in EVERYTHING regardless of if your team has the brains to find them).
If you ask a dev to do something that has never existed before they may use prior work to support that (thereby inheriting the bugs), they'll be specifying new domains (and there lurk bugs because it's by it's nature new and exploratory).
If you run a business with zero bugs, you're just too stupid to work with. Too Stupid to know there are bugs and edges and places your code, processes and staff won't be the right fit because no business or person has infinite resources.
If you strip your coders of revenue, which in my experience they spend managing health, psychology, CPD (because none of your budgets are that good). How do they meet your growing list of demands?
It's as much nonsense to remove money from someone you want to keep helping you as a physical attack on them. How can they help you when you're distracting them with other nonsense?
Even if you would prefer they left and you found someone else to help you, pay them. You couldn't walk to a shop as a reasonable person (please nobody highlight yourself as a cretin) to complain that the food you ate didn't measure up to your caloric or other needs.
In life sunk costs are those it's best to forget. Don't burn your money and encourage others to, trying to work out how to burn less money. Accept it's gone and look to move on giving actionable feedback, requesting deeper insight and perhaps involvement with process.
I will never apologize for bugs. I'll never feel bad I write them, and I'll always feel good when they are discovered because it's something else to keep my mind and wallet busy. Take away either my mind or my wallet and I'll go work elsewhere. I encourage other coders towards this too!
Best answer
Writing blameless postmortems, and realising that everyone makes mistakes creates a culture which embraces the fact that we are human. In a situation like you described I'd just avoid writing code so I write less bugs so I can't see that being realistic
Completely agree!
I would agree if I get a share of the money my code makes.
Jokes apart, this is toxic. If we start grading devs for the code they write rather than the value they bring to the team and the project, then we're not moving forward, we're just writing good code that amounts to nothing.
Here are my two cents.
It is not right not normal. Mistakes should not be punished, and bugs represent feedback.
If there is some technical debt or a misunderstanding of the requirements, you want your system to get that feedback, the earliest the better.
It is not good for the team nor the product to be shamed for a mistake you made six months ago.
A better culture is one where knowledge is encouraged, you should try to learn from those mistakes and share that knowledge with the team and/or make it available.