Call me a cynic, but annual expected-not-guaranteed bonuses are mostly just retention tools right? You get paid a bonus and suddenly you’re much happier and less inclined to change jobs. If that inclination comes back later then you have to weigh the loss of the proportion of your bonus earned so far in the downsides of leaving, since the bonus is never paid in part if you leave during the year.
Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
291–300 of 684 posts
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#292The 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.
The company still does it.
This is how employees should treat their relationships with their employers as well. Do what's right for you and your family, and don't act on some misguided sense of loyalty to your employer.
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#293This is literally a plot point in Christmas Vacation. Is also why I think it is silly for startups to provide too many perks. It sets obvious precedent and will upset more folks when you stop. Find ways to invest in the company so that success is it's own perk. If the company truly has more, work that into raises where you clearly tie the income to the success of the company.
> Is also why I think it is silly for startups to provide too many perks Should the opposite be true as well? Startup employees going home at 5 and fighting unreasonable schedules?
Having unreasonable schedules thrown on you is the sign of a bad startup. Working overtime means tomorrow will suffer. It might be worth it for that critical moment but tomorrow will come and the rest piper must be paid.
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#294I see a lot of comments bemoaning performance-based bonuses, but consider the following: > I remember being in shouting matches with our signal integrity team about among other things, how many capacitors we needed. These tiny devices evened out the power of the system, but they wanted far too many to be added to allow the design cheap and easy to build > Meanwhile I was waking up at 4AM on most days, in full-stress-…
I think you're drawing conclusions on a very biased sample. It's easy for me to write examples of bonuses causing all the wrong problems:
1. Introduce a huge amount of technical debt to get it under schedule.
2. Working really hard to get the bonus and either not getting it or getting much less than you expected/deserved. This is probably 5-10x more common than your scenario - you can even find comments on this submission with examples. Working 60-80 hour weeks to get a tiny bonus is very effective in inducing poor morale.
> In fact, I've noticed that people often add a net-negative value to many projects - their urge to add their 2 cents and make their impact felt, results in goalposts getting constantly shifted and launches getting continually delayed.
It's amusing you write this as an example of not having skin in the game, given that I often see this behavior from people who want to appear as if they have skin in the game, so they can claim a portion of the bonus. Almost every major initiative that is introduced in the company ends up with this.
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Startup employees going home at 5 and fighting unreasonable schedules? Absolutely. First, overwork doesn't lead to more productivity for knowledge workers. You get to pay that piper one way or another in the end. Second, back in the day, if your company was acquired for multiple billions, you had a pretty good shot at a life-changing infusion of cash. Nowadays, stock options given to employees often end up being wo…
> First, overwork doesn't lead to more productivity for knowledge workers. You get to pay that piper one way or another in the end. I have never seen any research showing net negative productivity for any job for under 60 hours a week of work. Overwork sucks but if you have evidence that it’s bad for productivity please cite it.
If you typed those words into google instead of asking for research you would have found this and millions of other documents.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/01/26/wor...
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 I can't pay my rent in recognition or appreciation though.
But using your money to buy happiness after your ten hour work Saturday is not going to be a big success, either. Yes, it does not replace money, but for some people it is worth more to feel happy at work than to receive a bit more money.
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Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#297This reminds me of a story back around that time about a guy who was, like, employee 200 at Amazon. He goes to the can, and sees a vestment sheet for the early employees, and realizes that he’s been hired just after people were getting stock grants. Just just prior to him are shortly to become millionaires, and he’s sitting there with a regular job. He quit because of the inequity, and did a tour with this story as a…
There's literally a biblical parable about this (though sort of in reverse). I'll paraphrase it (it's from Matthew Ch 20): A man goes out in the morning to find workers for his vineyard, promising them each denarius for the day. Around lunch he goes to find more workers. During the afternoon, he goes to find even more workers. At the end of the day the man pays everyone, starting with those who arrived during the aft…
> But there's another truth to it that the article also describes--if you agreed to work for a wage and then receive that wage, can it really be called unfair?
You define what's fair based on what information you have. If new information reveals that trade was not only unfair but a blatant rip off you are within your rights to feel something about it.
Still, I think one should accept the past trade. But there's no reason for that, combined to the new information to guarantee a continuous relation.
In other words, renegotiation based on new information that substantially change the deal is moral.
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#298This reminds me of a story back around that time about a guy who was, like, employee 200 at Amazon. He goes to the can, and sees a vestment sheet for the early employees, and realizes that he’s been hired just after people were getting stock grants. Just just prior to him are shortly to become millionaires, and he’s sitting there with a regular job. He quit because of the inequity, and did a tour with this story as a…
There is something buried deeply in our minds that recoils at being treated unfairly. I have a good job, the pay is decent, the work is interesting - but I'm in the process of looking for a different job because I didn't get a promotion. Some junior members on my team did get them though, and it feels unfair (I absolutely have no idea if they don't deserve it, and I like them as team mates). However, I had previously…
One of the companies I worked at previously made a big deal about employee
-driven performance review / promo packets every year. Everyone's title had a level like a role playing game. There was also a culture of compensation transparency among coworkers. I thought it was all quite toxic, leading to a lot of very well compensated people stressing out and complaining. At its worst, it lead to instances of passive aggression and depression across many teams.
My current company encourages regular direct feedback, mostly lacks titles internally, and there's a culture of compensation opacity among coworkers. Folk don't talk about money outside topics of general interest, and managers and HR are responsible for periodically reviewing and adjusting compensation for fairness. I haven't had to worry about or discuss money professionally in years, other than to get called into a short meeting to be pleasantly surprised by an adjustment. There's no bonuses other than the occasional verbal praise I receive from appreciative coworkers and management, and I think that's worth more than incrementally more money.
One time I did offer to pay out cash to any coworkers that reduced network traffic on a particularly over-utilized CAN bus, at a bounty of $0.10/Kbps. One sucker, er, respected coworker fell for it. Best $20 I ever spent!
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#299Bonuses should be: infrequent, irregular, unannounced, and large. Otherwise you end up in this trap where people expect the bonus and worse yet, count on it to pay their bills. It’s stupid to make it a part of your overall compensation package because if you do, then the bonus is always weighted based on overall company performance. So if the company has a bad year no one gets bonuses even if individual teams crushed…
> Otherwise you end up in this trap where people expect the bonus and worse yet, count on it to pay their bills. Kind of like tipping in the USA. It has nothing to do with service, is a standard percentage of the total bill (cork a $200 bottle of wine versus $20?). And the managers pay the wait staff less with the assumption they’ll make it up with tips.
I currently tip well. I would RATHER the costs be upfront and the complete wage and quality of service be covered by the company.
I would, correspondingly, love to see both a national minimum wage increase AND a ban on including tips in someone's expected wage as a single update to the laws.
Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t EVER work for a company that will take your shares if you quit. It’s a psychological trap and you are the prey. Any startup owner that strips your stake if you leave deserves to become the personal target of an obsessive and vindictive IRS auditor.
Generally I think the trade is that you can keep the stock if you quit but you don’t have stock. You have options that expire if you quit, so if you want the stock you must pay a lot of money to exercise the options, and you then pay tax based on gaining a high value of stock (potentially more tax than you could afford) even though its real is quite undetermined.
In other words, the company takes your shares if you quit.
The solution is to put the option strike deadline at 10 years in the future which is iirc what YC recommends. It's possible for these terms to be employee-friendly.