Friday, June 20, 2008

Perverse incentives

In his discussion of "perverse incentives" (reward systems that lead to the wrong behavior), Bob Sutton uses a Dilbert cartoon that I've been showing software engineering classes for over 10 years :)

The comments to his post seem to be fixated on rewarding developers for finding software defects, which is the point of the Dilbert cartoon, but Sutton is making a larger point :)

I also like the Dilbertian take on user interfaces (here, and here).