Apply HN: Skein – Engineers Paid on Commision
I found your description here a bit more difficult to understand than the description on the website.<p>I like the concept, as in having revenue streams that can be shared with the people building the product. You thought about things like house keeping tasks (and bugs etc). I can imagine that it&#x27;s an easy way to clean up some technical debt, just divert a bigger chunk of the revenue towards those bugs.<p>Couple of things I&#x27;d love to see worked out a bit more. Maybe you mention them somewhere, but still:<p>- How does this work in an interface? Sales people will not really go into git and see it, so I assume some kind of interface with sliders that match the streams+tags. Showing this can be insightful (a sketch can already give more insight in what you&#x27;re actually building).<p>- I assume there is some kind of holding period so that the &#x27;bug&#x27; tag for example can be extended for a while, giving me the guarantee that those 20% of the shared revenue that went to bugs actually stays for a couple of weeks.<p>- There is (obviously) a lot of weird scenario&#x27;s possible here. Imagine a business requirement changing. I wrote a big piece of the functionality, but it becomes simpler. 90% of the code can be removed, someone else writes another 10%. How does this equate to money shared? I did all the &#x27;heavy-lifting&#x27;, but the other person made it workable in the current increment.<p>- I can see this become really difficult to manage in larger teams and products, and possibly leading to unhealthy competition where people are enticed to work more against each other than with each other. Maybe there could be certain ways to make working together more attractive? For example, commits within a week from each other by different people attract some kind of bonus % to all involved?<p>- In general, the idea is nice, but I wonder if the &#x27;old fashioned&#x27; way of sharing profit with a normal bonus (hey, you guys did a great job) won&#x27;t work better if applied correctly, although this could also be seen as a way of making the bonus structure work less politically colored, or at least more transparent.