Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

I will always take a high salary over any kind of bonus structure/program. I worked for a big aerospace company and earned what I considered to be a pretty mediocre salary but we had a profit sharing program that was about 4% of your annual salary, plus we frequently received spot awards and a decent holiday bonus (one year I got a bonus that was worth approximately 2 paychecks). It was nice but it always felt inconsistent and unpredictable, and then one year they basically stopped all of these programs and also restructured our benefits programs such that they were contributing far less to our health insurance premiums AND they stopped paying into our pension fund (yes, we had a pension!). At that point I calculated my total compensation was actually significantly less than it had been in years past and there was no reason for me to stay. I found another job with a 50% bump in pay and since then I have only accepted positions where I could count on a consistently high salary or rate (if I do a 1099 kind of project).

> I’m not staying at a job past 5 unless I have a share of the company. Screw that. Every startup owner thinks they are unique and that’s why 90% of them fail.

Not all companies are the same, and not all companies are startups. I'm back working at the same company which was my first job in tech. Not for the second time, not the third either, but the fourth time now. I was first hired there over 22 years ago in tech support. It's always been a good place to work, that takes care of it's employees (even if it can't pay a huge amount for some positions, there's always a lot of recognition that everyone is needed to make it work, and everyone is appreciated), and I never left because I disliked the company or the work, but because I wanted to focus on school, or explore a new opportunity, or work with family, etc. Our customers love us, and my fellow employees generally like working here, to my knowledge.

They don't expect me or my fellow employees to work past our normal hours (except when on call, or it it's a night-op for sysadmins, which you can generally just take chunks of time off the next day if you like). Yet people do work a little later to finish stuff, or check in to make sure something they did earlier in the week isn't causing problems over the weekend. Because they care about not making problems for their fellow employees, and not adversely affecting our customers, which have a high opinion of us.

All that is a long way of saying that not every company is a startup or behaves as one. People in silicon valley are somewhat conditioned to look for the startups and make that gamble, but there are other choices, and they aren't always nearly as bad as people have been led to believe. Many jobs that are considered shit work can be rewarding if approached the right way. Even IT or programming at a bank can be rewarding if you're lucky enough to have management that mostly gets out of the way and if you cultivate a relationship with the people (the other employees in this case) that you're serving, and see how you make their life better an easier (and there are always opportunities for this, if you pay attention).

Pretty sure my old job did this. People on programs that were successful would get a little bonus. This ended up changing to “every program across every sector must meet all business goals for bonuses to be paid.” That made it impossible to get a bonus when some programs were experimental or R&D type things that were kind of expected to run on a deficit for a while.

Not to sound miserly, but how is this a bonus for the employee whatsoever?

Many years ago I managed a small company that gave out bonuses. It was miserable for the most part. People did come to rely on those bonuses as if they were actual pay.

I worked with the owner to develop a system where if the quarterly bonus was over a specific amount 6 quarters in a row we translated that into a pay raise for everyone and that would effectively remove/lower the bonus but give the employees more stability. It has been a lot of years since I have been there, but the last I heard the bonuses were very small but the avg. pay was nearly 2x over any other company in the same industry. Turnover is near zero and the number of people waiting to get a job there was significant.