[doublement]

In the long run, having a company dependent on a handful of highly-paid superstars is an incredible risk. Moreover if one team's hiring practices create a "class system" where there are vast disparities in how engineers are paid, there are going to be resentments.

If you build a special team in a company that has different norms overall, everything that you accomplish is going to be discounted according to how much it makes the rest of the company harder to manage, and how vulnerable the company becomes to a small number of superstars leaving. There's a bigger picture than just what the team gets done.

EDIT: That said, if the results are markedly better than the company's general performance, the company as a whole might need some re-tooling. But a special team isn't going to stay special for long, either way.

[codys]

Teams with better people being more productive and getting paid more seems like a normal thing to expect. It seems weird to expect all people and teams to be only to be average, and to see deviations from this as highly risky.

It doesn't make sense to attack the special team here as that team exists to show what is wrong with other parts of the organization, and how productivity might be improved if incentives/measures were changed.

It's also one managers attempt to be more effective. Should one not strive to be more effective? Is it better to make sure that one doesn't differ from average as that would be risky to the business and create resentment?

[doublement]

If a more productive team emerged naturally from incentives available to everyone, and that team collected large bonuses as a result of proven success, I think the company and the team would both be better off.

If a team is designed from the beginning with a different set of rules than the rest of the company, it has a lot to answer for before it even begins, and its achievements will be accordingly discounted.