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Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

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Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#221

Post by danieltillett »

projectileboy wrote: post #77

The asymmetry between how employees agonize over their behavior towards their employers vs how employers think of their employees never ceases to amaze me. Never forget that your employer will gleefully lay off their most loyal employees if doing so is somehow in alignment with some executive’s comp. I’m not saying you should ever behave unethically, I’m just saying that if you’re on the field, you should be aware of…

Many employers agonise over laying off employees, I would go so far as to say the vast majority do. Many employers try to keep on employees in situations where they really should be laid off, putting their own jobs at risk.

Don’t get into the the mindset that employers are all psychopaths - not only is it not true, but it will damage your career thinking this way.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#222

Post by rachelbythebay »

harryh wrote: post #78
dilyevsky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If i recall the same happened when google replaced their holiday gift phone with donation to some charities they picked.

Before it was a gift phone it was $1,000. They changed that in....2008ish maybe. I can't remember the exact year.

2009 was both. Cash a few months before, N1 right before Christmas.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#223

Post by xref »

Everyone is focusing on the bonus part of the story but man, I really enjoyed the computing history about working inside DEC in those days.

Anyone got other good computing history books/stories to recommend? I really enjoyed Masters of Doom and Hard Drive (about old-testament Gates, not new-dove Gates)

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#224

Post by rachelbythebay »

dilyevsky wrote: post #117
harryh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before it was a gift phone it was $1,000. They changed that in....2008ish maybe. I can't remember the exact year.

The year before i joined - 2010 was last one afaik (also when it got leaked)

2009 leaked. Tweeted while most of us were still in line. Still got the screenshot.

One thousand dollar impromptu cash bonus. I work for Google!!

... October 16th. Dumb.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#225

Post by pmkiwi »

ccortes wrote: post #39

Oh man I hate bonuses so much. At my last job we had a monthly bonus that made up to 33% of our total income. These were based on certain KPIs we had to achieve. The thing is, everyone can cheat the KPIs. Even more so if such a big part of your income relies on it. I also felt they killed creativity and intellectual freedom completely. You were not able anymore to work on something else that you'd consider more impor…

I went through the same thing in my previous work (consulting firm). Management set up monthly targets related to billing enough hours to the clients (something like 85% in average in our team of 5).

Most of the time we met the criteria even if not everyone was making the target. Usually, 4 were 100% billable while 1 was the anchor :).

One month, I spent a fair amount of time of documenting something because it was the 3rd time that the same errors were showing up so I told to my manager to decrease the target for that month. It was agreed and understood by everyone that the target could be lowered when required (leave, training, etc ...). Except that my manager refused to lower the target so I spent 3 months talking to CEO/CFO to get this bonus paid (more for my colleagues than for me) but I never managed to convince them. So the same feeling as you described kicked in in the team. People started to work only billable hours, neglecting everything else to make sure we met the target all the time.

I obviously left this company after a serious discussion with my manager. I still remember sending an ultimate email asking for the bonus on my last Friday at 4pm.

So yes, give a decent comp and say that bonuses might be paid if the company is performing well. If they are ever paid, I will take my family for a nice dinner and buy some books with them. Else than fine, my mortgage is not in danger!

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#226

Post by cmauniada »

jedberg wrote: post #17

When I worked at eBay, we had a bonus program based on company revenue. It was around 6% of your salary max and managers got around 25% max based on the same formula. For the first few years, you could count on getting a max bonus every quarter. To the point where most everyone who worked there had always gotten one. And the one quarter, we didn't get the max bonus. In fact, I don't think we got it all. People scream…

This reminds me of the (roughly the same) saying that people always spend their next pay-check instead of their current one.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#227

Post by kolbusa »

danieltillett wrote: post #221
projectileboy wrote: post #77

The asymmetry between how employees agonize over their behavior towards their employers vs how employers think of their employees never ceases to amaze me. Never forget that your employer will gleefully lay off their most loyal employees if doing so is somehow in alignment with some executive’s comp. I’m not saying you should ever behave unethically, I’m just saying that if you’re on the field, you should be aware of…

Many employers agonise over laying off employees, I would go so far as to say the vast majority do. Many employers try to keep on employees in situations where they really should be laid off, putting their own jobs at risk. Don’t get into the the mindset that employers are all psychopaths - not only is it not true, but it will damage your career thinking this way.

I've been on the 'lucky' side of many layoffs. It is always good to remember that the responsibility of a corporation is to shareholders, not employees.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#228

Post by lixtra »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #209

I knew a guy who put his two weeks notice in just before the annual Christmas bonus came out. So they stiffed him on the bonus. They ended up paying for that in spades. This was in the planning field and he was moving from a private consulting firm to a government job. Government is where the real power is for this industry. If they were one minute late "Sorry, we are closed/you missed the deadline." If they had any…

> They ended up paying for that in spades.

Assuming that guy behaved differently with other companies, shouldn’t we call it corruption?

Edit:

> This was in the planning field and he was moving from a private consulting firm to a government job.

Some downvoters want explain? Seriously HN, you want this kind of government workers?

I didn’t assume so. It was an interesting story to share.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#229

Post by JohnBooty »

rdtwo wrote: post #27

Op got robbed. Not only did he work way more hours to meet a milestone but in the end he got the bonus because it was structured in such a way that he did not have sufficient control of the outcome. It always surprises me how genius level folks can’t do simple math to realize that salaried employees get compensated on the compensation/hours worked formula and if compensation is fixed and hours increase you are gettin…

    structured in such a way that he did not have 
    sufficient control of the outcome
Yeah, I worked at a job once that tried an incentive program that failed miserably for this reason.

We were supposed to hit X number of billable hours per month. For the first few months I worked my ass off and achieved this.

However I wound up with almost zero bonus. It turned out that the actual bonus was based on what the clients actually paid, and when they paid it.

We had clients fail to pay, or they paid late, or had been given discounts. So most of my hours didn't count, or were shifted to subsequent months... which also happened to be months were sales wasn't able to provide enough billable hours to us for us to reach our bonus.

Total BS.

As you say... and similar to the linked article... I worked my butt off for the bonuses, and fulfilled my part of the bargain. But was then denied, for reasons 100% out of my control.

I quit. Even as a 23 year old that was obviously crap.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#230

Post by jandrewrogers »

sneak wrote: post #133
atypmorn wrote: post #72

In my last job I worked at a company that paid slightly below the market rate, not including the bonus. At the time I got the job, I didn't realise that I was already being significantly underpaid. I thought it was a bit low but didn't realise the extent of it. So when I got the new job, I was blown over by the huge jump in salary and couldn't be happier. What was better? I was entitled to receive each year up to a 1…

This is what I think of when companies offer the passive-aggressive "unlimited vacation time" policy. It's not unlimited, and you shouldn't start off your employer-employee relationship with an obvious lie. Set a policy and make it clear that you are exchanging x dollars for y amount of work.

At some companies they call it “discretionary time off” to make it clear it is between you and your manager but the concept is the same. What many companies fail to do is properly train their managers (1) how to manage this with their reports and (2) to consistently take time off as an example to the people that report to them and to set expectations. Without a program in place to encourage people to use it, people don’t use as much as the company typically intends. Due to legal nuances, it is a bit tricky to officially track performance in this regard.

Most companies that I’ve worked at which had this type of vacation policy had a directive for managers to ensure that every employee took at least 3-5 weeks of vacation every year (the minimum varied with company). It wasn’t always successful but that was the objective. More than that was fine too.

One of the original motivations behind these policies was the burst-y nature of some types of engineering work. Companies wanted to allow engineers to take 2-3 months of paid vacation after a relatively intense 12-18 months with few breaks working to ship some product. Giving people multiple months of vacation is surprisingly difficult without also running afoul of other legal and accounting complexities around vacation time in various jurisdictions. The “unlimited / discretionary” policy is essentially a loophole in US law that originally allowed managers to reward people with large amounts of time off. It has been generalized, and has other accounting benefits, but this was the original use case.

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