The Most Dangerous Incentive in Growing Engineering Organizations
Undermining organizational culture with visibility bias
I’ve been a professional software engineer for almost 30 years. Over that time I’ve served as a manager, engineering leader, VP of Engineering, and CTO across organizations ranging from small startups to companies the size of IBM. Watching engineering organizations grow from small teams into large, complex systems has given me a long view into how culture and incentives evolve — and sometimes break.
One of the most destructive tendencies I’ve seen develop over time is surprisingly subtle: engineers begin to believe that the only way to advance their careers is to work on the most visible, most successful products inside the company.
At first glance, that seems reasonable. Of course people want to work on the products that generate revenue, attract executive attention, and shape the company’s public identity. But inside a modern software organization, that instinct can quietly undermine the long-term health of the entire engineering system.
Visibility Bias Inside Engineering Organizations
Even in companies that technically have a single product — especially SaaS organizations — different parts of the system receive vastly different levels of visibility. The UI, the client experience, and customer-facing features are seen by marketing, sales, executives, and customers every day. Those parts of the system become the center of attention.
Engineers naturally gravitate toward that visibility. It feels like the place where careers are made.
But modern software systems are far larger than what users see. Reliability engineering, infrastructure, fraud mitigation, security, risk management, customer support tooling — these areas operate behind the scenes. They are less glamorous, less visible, and often harder to explain to non-technical stakeholders. Yet they are just as critical to a company’s success as the features that generate revenue.
When incentives drift toward visibility instead of system health, organizations slowly become unbalanced.
From Boxed Software to Web Systems: A Cultural Shift
Early in my career, I worked on packaged desktop software — the kind that shipped in boxes on store shelves. In those environments, nearly every engineer worked on the same deliverable. The entire team focused on what would go into the box.
As the industry shifted toward web-based systems, and later toward mobile and distributed architectures, that unity disappeared. Engineering work fragmented into layers: front-end, mobile, APIs, infrastructure, data systems, security, and operational tooling.
The engineers working on the visible layers received more attention from across the company. Sales teams, marketing teams, and executives could see the UI. They could interact with it directly. Naturally, conversations gravitated there.
Meanwhile, the backend systems grew larger, more complex, and more essential — but less visible.
That imbalance created a cultural gravity well.
The Executive Table and the Hidden Work
When I moved into leadership roles and eventually sat at executive tables, I saw this bias amplified. Entire executive teams would discuss what the product looked like, how it behaved for customers, and which features were driving growth. Those conversations were important — but someone had to worry about how the system actually ran.
More often than not, that responsibility fell to the engineering leader alone.
Over time, I found myself investing more attention in infrastructure, reliability, and backend architecture — not because it was more interesting, but because it was necessary. The health of the company depended on systems that most people in the room couldn’t see.
This is where many organizations struggle: how do you convince engineers to invest their careers in parts of the system that receive less external recognition?
Why the “Best Product” Mentality Is Dangerous
When engineers believe promotions come from working on the most visible product areas, several problems emerge:
– Critical infrastructure roles become harder to staff.
– Reliability and security work become reactive instead of proactive.
– Organizational knowledge becomes skewed toward features rather than systems.
– Long-term risk accumulates quietly beneath short-term success.
Modern architectures make this especially dangerous. Backend systems are no longer simple servers running behind a UI. They include distributed services, data pipelines, observability platforms, and compliance layers that grow more complex every year.
Ignoring these areas doesn’t make them less important — it makes them fragile.
Engineering Leadership as Incentive Design
The challenge for engineering leaders has always been incentive alignment.
You cannot promote engineers faster or compensate them more simply because they work on the UI or on the product areas that executives see most often. If the incentive structure favors visibility over impact, engineers will optimize for visibility every time.
Instead, organizations need to reward outcomes that reflect true system health:
– System uptime and reliability
– Backend performance and scalability
– Risk mitigation and fraud prevention
– Operational excellence and maintainability
These achievements are harder to measure and often less glamorous, but they are the foundation that allows visible products to succeed.
In my own leadership journey, I tried to make infrastructure and backend work a first-class path to growth. That meant recognizing engineers publicly for reliability improvements, tying performance reviews to system outcomes rather than feature count, and ensuring that compensation and promotion paths reflected the value of invisible work.
Aligning Culture With Reality
The deeper lesson is simple: culture follows incentives.
If engineering organizations reward visibility, engineers will chase visibility. If they reward stability, collaboration, and long-term system health, engineers will invest in those areas instead.
The goal is not to diminish UI or product innovation — those are essential to any company’s success. But a sustainable engineering culture recognizes that the parts of the system no one sees are often the ones that determine whether the company survives.
After three decades in engineering, one truth has become clear to me: the strongest organizations are not the ones where everyone wants to work on the most successful product.
They are the ones where engineers understand that success comes from building — and valuing — the entire system.