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Oxide’s compensation model: how is it going?

Reflecting on how our compensation model is going

I find my job is often to help quiet this inner critic while at the same time stoking what I feel is a healthy urge: when one holds one’s colleagues in high regard, there is an especially strong desire to help contribute — to prove oneself worthy of a superlative team. Just as if you were to compensate software engineers based on the number of lines of code they wrote, this results in perverse incentives and predictable disasters — and any Silicon Valley vet will have plenty of horror stories of middle management jockeying for reqs or reorgs when they should have been focusing on product and customers. This leads to all sorts of wild phenomena, and most technology workers will be able to tell stories of doing things that we’re clearly right for the company, but having to hide it from management that thought only narrowly in terms of their own stated KPIs and MBOs.

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