alt Hacker NewsIf you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/
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breppp • yesterday at 5:04 PM
The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy
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phainopepla2 • yesterday at 7:34 PM
While it is good story for illustrating perverse incentives, there is no good historical evidence that the cobra bounty program actually existed.
I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.
Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.
1 - https://archive.org/details/programmingprodu0000jone/page/n1...