381–390 of 684 posts
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Most of the time it’s not vindictive founders. It’s that the options cost money to buy. And if the company is successful one might have to pay taxes on the stock options too.
You can pay for options with some of your options, at least in the UK.
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…
I know of a few companies where the pay isn’t quite competitive without the bonus. If you lose 10% of your income with the same or greater responsibilities (life often gets harder when the money gets scarce), your finances and plans don’t give a shit what you called it, they just know it’s gone.
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The typical startup problem like the above is a more extreme example of people mailing it in until bonuses are out: people mailing it in until the startup is acquired or goes public because the company is doing well and they lose their shares/options if they quit
It's a weird incentive model when you get down to it. It's rare for individuals who have been with a company for a long time to be fired. While RSUs/guaranteed equity incentivises individuals to leave when they get bored. Options provide an incentive for bored/uncommitted employees to hang on. I wonder if this is why mid-life startups that stop growing start to feel "stale". Too many people who just want their money…
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Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors. It sure looks like people who work more than 40 hours a week on average do better than those who don’t. This is not a claim about what I wish was true, but about what actually seems to be true. The actual research on this is scarce to the point of non-existence. It may actuall…
> Feel free to name any category of professional where working over 40 hours a week isn’t quite normal. YMMV but the only time I ever experienced the myth that "working over 40 hours a week is the norm" was when I started working at a US-based company. And the only reason unpaid overtime was the norm was that managers, specially skip-level management, did a piss-poor job establishing sane goals based on realistic tim…
Irish lawyers and doctors work well over 40 hours a week on average too. I feel pretty confident the same is true in finance. Tax professionals in Spain do too. That about exhausts my personal knowledge of working hours in Europe but I kind of doubt management work less than 40 hours a week anywhere, even the civil service.
> and typically threatened to fire people pretty much each and every single week if they did not met those unrealistic goals.
The secret to greater American productivity and hence wealth. People just work more hours.
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If you do really good can you take a year off? If not, then it’s still not unlimited. I’d like my salary and benefits be quantified in my contract rather than “manager discretion” which can go south in a hurry if you have a terrible manager.
If you want to be real pedantic I can counter with the fact that at least in the US and with the “at-will” contract just because they promised you 25 days of vacation doesn’t mean you can take it whenever you please or at all.
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…
Yeah, but your example is a little different than the OP's - I think part of this though is that the company is using the 'bonus' effectively as salary but with the idea that they don't have to guarantee its future. The company treats it like salary, the employees treat it like salary, recruiters probably mention it as part of comp like it's salary, etc. Then one day they decide not to do it, of course people are pis…
But many successful companies and employees do, including everywhere I've worked.
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Ouch, 25% vs. 6%. That's how they value managers vs. (engineers? or everyone else?). Sad.
I'm surprised there isn't more discussion on this. That's more than 4x more for managers than engineers.
You want to do right by your people (you know, if you're not a complete arsehole). Hopefully you pay them well. But revenue isn't always easy to predict, and once you give someone a raise, you can't take it away again (at least not easily). So you can't pay people excessive amounts all of the time, because the money might not be there all of the time. Of course the effect of a single large bonus (annually or one-off) is much greater than 1/12th of that same amount tacked on every month. On top of that, some bonus plans can have tax benefits (though I suspect this widely differs between countries etc). Bonuses seem like a pretty good way of paying people what you'd like to pay them, but without the risk of it bankrupting you.
I'm a little bit torn when it comes to bonus amounts, however. Some companies give everyone the same bonus. Or perhaps everyone within the same department or job category. This is nice from a "we're all in the same boat"-perspective. But it ignores the reality that some employees do much more valuable work than others (I'm sure there's a fancy pareto-like name for that, but I don't remember it). On the other hand, it might encourage some employees to "go above and beyond" in a way that's unhealthy.
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…
This is a moral conflict if I ever saw one. Assuming that the guy was a pedant only against his former company and not everyone around. On one hand, a sleazy company gets karma-whipped. On the other hand, the overall harm from a public authority enforcing the law unevenly because of a personal grudge is not negligible either. Junior people working with him will normalize this behavior and repeat it. Neutral public in…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26850935
I find it tiresome that so many people think they can know for certain what was going on based on a third-hand retelling after the fact and are so certain he was up to no good.
I am reminded of the importance of the "innocent until proven guilty" standard. Once people get it in their head that, clearly, he's guilty of something, all rational assessment seems to be readily abandoned in the name of a zeal for supposed righteousness and justice.
The term witch hunt comes to mind.
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> success is it's own perk aka, equity compensation. Because i sure aint gonna consider it a perk if a CEO (or owners) to get richer, while i just get praise for making the success!
> Peter Gibbons: You see, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't even care. >Bob Porter: Don't- don't care? >Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? Before I started working at MASSIVE CORP I thought Office Space was a comedy.....
I was at a startup company that in my opinion got a great idea and with enough focus, we could have been successful. I always tried to think about the product, the impact, the roadmap, the quality... And after some time I realized that I just annoy the founders and I care and worry more about things then they do. So I decided to care about half as much as they did and in the meantime look for another job.
Today, I work at a big corporation, I was again motivated to be able to change things, improve things. The feature I recently worked on was just put on a roadmap with a ridiculous deadline, our work is blocked by like 5 different backend teams around the country, and somehow I should bend over backwards to deliver on time?
Keeping your motivation is hard when everything around you is trying squash it.
And I am not even sure it's a problem. Of course I wouldn't say this at my next job interview, but in reality, if you are motivated, most often you will get disappointed really fast. On the other hand, when you just go in to work, do a reasonable amount of effort, then you can work better with others with less stress, and in the end, who cares about "those few extra units"?