Misaligned incentives
I had a great conversation with a co-worker this past week. We covered a lot of different topics, but one thread of our conversation stuck in my mind today: if the incentives at the root of a system are not aligned with societal good, the system will lead to bad states even way downstream.
We talked about how the venture capital model is highly optimized, just not for anything like product stability, product quality, worker well-being, or other societal goods. It is highly optimized for making lots of money for venture capitalists and, to a lesser extent, founders. This misalignment at the root of the venture capital system leads to bad states downstream. One example of a bad state is the quality of the codebase that we work on. In the rush to get customers and increase VC-facing metrics, we sacrifice code quality constantly. We leave off tests, use bad abstractions that won't handle changes well in the future, and structure our code poorly (e.g. lots of business logic that lives in the datastore layer).
It is hard to make key people in this system care about such matters, because the incentives are misaligned way back at the root. There isn't a direct correlation between code quality (or the worker satisfaction that comes from working on a high quality codebase) and how much money can be made from a venture-backed startup. So the people who have the ability to make change in the system don't care. The people who most need to stop and think critically about the system are the least likely to do so.
It's hard to see a way forward. I think the most is to eventually leave the industry, and look for a system that has incentives that more closely align with my values. Of course, the world in general doesn't align with my values usually, so compromises will have to be made I'm sure.
How can we fight back against misaligned incentives, and how can we motivate those in power to analyze the systems they control and restructure them to do good for people?