> As the manager of the Observability team at my current company, I find myself in a rather unique position. As part of my job, I get to define the “golden path” of Observability here.
Alarm bells ringing.
Be careful when you give teams single remits, for they will execute on them to the exclusion of all else.
I feel like the world would be a better place if architects were bonused on company project completion.
> I feel like the world would be a better place if architects were bonused on company project completion.
Be careful of running into Goodhart's Law when doing this.
In my experience, absolutely nothing replaces lots of time (7-10 year time horizon granularity), and conscientiousness. Everything else is gamed into Goodhart's territory.
Where I've seen architects incentivized the way you describe, the definitions of "project" and "completion" are tightly scrutinized, and all other considerations thrown to the wayside. I see developer experience, operations supportability, troubleshooting visibility, observability, extensibility, upgradeability, and so on, all sacrificed upon the incentives altar. Surprised Pikachu face when fantastic company project completions "suddenly" turns into an ocean of technical debt with a particularly nasty Marianas Trench of mission-critical code everyone is afraid to touch but must somehow be tamed to help strategically evolve the company meet new business needs.
Which is why I've been pursuaded to the qualitative over quantitative side for end metrics. E.g. partner team rating of your team, surveys.
Yes, it can turn into political infighting, but on the whole I've seen it turn out better than trying to hit numbers, with everyone trying to manipulate the definition of a number to their advantage.
Alarm bells ringing.
Be careful when you give teams single remits, for they will execute on them to the exclusion of all else.
I feel like the world would be a better place if architects were bonused on company project completion.