There is an odd relationship between the ideas of bounty hunting and law enforcement. In the old west there seemed to be an idea that offering a reward for the dead or alive capture of a wanted criminal was a perfectly acceptable way to get things done across a vast territory lacking in sherrifs or marshalls. In more modern times the idea of retrieving someone who skipped out on a bail bond (in parts of the USA anyway) remains an actual thing with those people making a living out of bounty hunting keeping that gray area between the law and lawlessness populated. In the world of IT the term “bounty” has taken on a different meaning, though they are still hunted and, despite their seemingly obvious advantages, remain a hotly debated subject.
The term Bounty Programme is sometimes applied to an incentive scheme designed to encourage members of the team to learn a specific skill or technology and prove they’ve done so by sitting the relevant certification exam. I have seen three such programmes in effect over my career so far and have become something of an advovate for them for a couple of reasons.
I first encountered the practice was at the very start of my time in IT when I was at Digital Equipment Corp. operating out of their Galway offices in the late 1990’s. Back then, Digital offered a £1,000 increase in salary for every passed Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) exam, with an additional uplift applied to the special few who went all the way to completing six or so exams for the coveted Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) qualification. During my time there I also encountered a couple of engineers who claimed that similiar incentives were in place for other vendor certifications like those offered by Cisco (with the Cisco CCIE qualification being especially revered at the time).
I was only a witness to these types of incentive while at Digitial but later benefitted from a bounty programme at Aon where a special arrangement was established as part of the initiative to adopt the AWS cloud. In order to get everyone excited and skilled in the new cloud technologies that were about to become part of our daily lives, management proposed the following: complete an approved training course (in this case it was one of the AWS Associate Certification courses offered by A Cloud Guru who used to provide training on Udemy before they merged with Pluralsight) and prove the completion by obtaining the completion certificate, then sit the certification exam, pass the exam and present all receipts and certs to your manager for a full refund of training and exam fees and a once-off cash bonus of €1,000. This is the programme I used to achieve my own AWS Solution Architect Associate certification and informed my own implemention of a bountry programme a few years later.
While at ACETECH, I implemented a Bounty Programme to encourage the team to upskill in Docker & Kubernetes as well as in general cloud skills relating to Azure or AWS. Following the template provided by the Aon programme, team members looked after their own learning costs and were refunded the expenses as well as awarded a bonus when they produced a verifiable certification, which resulted in a noticable improvement of how containers and cloud were utilised to do some pretty sohpisticated things at scale and also addressed a very real problem we faced with advanced knowledge being concentrated with particular team members leading to a variety of issues.
Bounties can be simple incentives to promote upskilling in specific technologies or they can be broader programmes designed to ensure that the baseline of skills in a team is at as high a level as possible, and the schemes themselves are not hard to manage, which makes the level of resistence these programme tend to encounter all the harder to understand.
I have run into a couple of negative schools of thought around Bounty Programmes that have worked to prevent this type of incentive being introduced.
The first blocking concern I hit came from a fellow IT professional who stated that such programmes set a bad precident in an organisation that could only lead to conflict around who was incentivised to do something over some other member of the organisation in a different department or with a different focus. The concerned individual was being genuine but hadn’t considered how other parts of the organisation are incentivised differently, for example the sales team or the senior leadership team, with both of these groups having different bonus systems in place compared to the IT department. Additionally, incentives for continuing professional education have been commonplace in areas like Accounts, Law, and Finance for decades and are widely accepted as a means to reward those who upskill appropriately.
The other line of thinking was based on a cost concern with a finance executive trying to shut down the programme due to worries of being flooded with team members claiming multiple bonuses and requiring a lot of expense to be covered. This type of concern is easily addressed by limiting the scope of the programme; at Aon, only the first fifteen people to complete one of three approved certifications were able to get the bonus and their expenses had to be proven to be related to materials from approved training providers, basically there was a budget allocated to cover the best case scenario of many people getting certified that implemented a cap on the costs of the programme and suggested how many bounties could be won. In most situations, there’s no need to worry as the uptake is rarely 100% of the team and from a risk management point of view the budget only gets spent if people get certified, no passed exam means no payout, though there’s a strong argument to be made that it’s far riskier for an organisation to have staff using technologies they are unskilled with; an organisation should want their team knowing what they are doing while accepting the reality of the pace of change that’s a defining factor in IT.
While constant change is a norm in technology there is a lot of value to be gained from this type of incentive programme even when you may reasonably expect IT people to live for change and the challenges and rewards of learning new things. So why pay for something when the very personalities involved are likely to be learning these things for themselves anyway? There is a very big difference in the quality of the experience between learning new technologies in an unstructured manner and having to get into the details to a level that passes an exam, sometimes down to extreme details like flag switch settings and decimal point differences, knowledge that could make all the difference in a production environment. Finding a way to get people excited about learning a new technology to a high level of profeciency feels like something worth doing on such a regular basis that it should be accomodated in the Total Cost of Ownership of any given system or as a basic component of a Salary/Incentives/Bonus (SIB) calculation for a team member.
Sometimes the world of work can be a lot like the lawless parts of the wild west and in IT there is an ever-present pressure to just get things done that has not necessarily served us well in the past. That desire to see work done can lead to details being skipped over, timelines being fungible, and standards of professionalism to be reframed in favor of a quicker pace that may not necessarily allow time for efforts like Continuing Professional Development to be established properly. Accepting that practicing IT isn’t the same as practicing law or accountancy and that things need to move at the market’s pace suggests that there is value in certifications from vendors or standards bodies and that these will change constantly, leading therefore to the notion that there’s something to be gained from incentivising those on your team to develop their knowledge in a structured manner on an on-going basis, if only to ensure that foundational knowledge of their trade stays solid enough to build upon.
Martin Minnock 