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Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

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Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#391

Post by nathancahill »

thedrbrian wrote: post #368
chii wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.....

Or the other joke:

My Boss arrived at work in a brand new Ferrari.

I told him: "Wow that's a nice car".

He replied:

"If you work hard, put all your hours in, and strive for excellence, I'll get another one next year"

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#392

Post by pm90 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #365
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…

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…

Public institutions will never be neutral as long as we have people staffing them and interacting with other people. It’s inevitable that these power dynamics would form: it’s heartening though that it can only be at the edges. That’s a very good sign.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#393

Post by hellow0rldz »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #334
hellow0rldz wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 re…

You have the right to feel anything about anything for any reason. Whether you can renegotiate or not is not based on your feelings or morals, but how good you are at power games.

This a very one linear way of looking at the world.

Sure, it might be about "power games" but feelings do matter and morals too and how one feels about it does give you the extra energy and drive to succeed at a (re)negotiation. So... how can one ignore all that?

The original debate was if it's unfair.

I think taking advantage too much during an initial negotiation is unfair but since the other side did agree it is a "fair" trade for the other party (based on the partial info they had).

Once extra information is revealed, the trade is not fair in retrospect. But new information should only apply to future trades: as such, negotiating or quitting is moral.

You might be sub-estimating how good people are at power games. Quitting out of spite is know to happen so people are willing to take a loss due to unfairness.

Assuming rationality and ignore feelings and morals while focusing only on the technicality of "power games" is super simplistic.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#394

Post by wott »

rualca wrote: post #367
barry-cotter wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Even in France, where the base legal hours are only 35 hours a week, intellectual/upper professions in a full-time position work an average of 43 hours a week.

That's the average which includes women, who work 10% less (in terms of number of hours worked) than men. If you only consider men, you reach an average week of 45 hours for those professions.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#395

Post by kaba0 »

forgingahead wrote: post #254
ben0x539 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my boss asks: what is to stop me threatening to resign every time I don’t get my way? Nothing. That's how negotiating an employment relationship works. Holy shit.

It's not. That is an independent contractor relationship. Employment means you play ball for the stability of the paycheck. If you want to throw a tantrum every time you feel slighted, you shouldn't commit to a full-time permanent job. Employees are not the top of the totem pole, there are always other factors that people making these decisions have to consider. They don't always have to share that with you. It's a n…

Boss-employee relationship goes both ways.

They pay me because of my work/because I am valuable. From the story, the poster was valuable (otherwise the boss would not have paid him/her out).

> Employees are not the top of the totem pole, there are always other factors that people making these decisions have to consider

And that is entirely his/her thing. If I was promised this and that for a given task, I should be getting it, even at the detriment of the company, his her own paycheck, whatever. I am not responsible for the well-being of a company, it’s not your “family”.

Of course, during unexpected events (like COVID), things like an OPTIONAL temporary pay reduction for every employee (very much including the bosses themselves) is acceptable, and I think any employee planning to stay there will gladly accept such if the leadership is otherwise not exploitive/fair.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#396

Post by serial_dev »

laurent92 wrote: post #282
m463 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After that I went freelance. And 15 years later I can say it was the best decision ever. Every time I've left a job, I've been uncertain and conflicted. Every. Time. Then, a week or two into the new job... Every. Time. ...I thought, "Wow! I should have done this sooner!"

I’ve worked for a startup who was giving 866 stock options per month. Had I known they are valued $125 today, I would have: - Shut up a few more times because I’d trust more the managers, and just followed the stream, - Accepted to be patient about being a developer on a boring project, because what stressed me was “I don’t know enough to reach the career level that can allow me to ever buy a house.” - Made 4 million…

The mindset you should have (I know it's easy for me to say) is that you made the best decision with the data available at the time.

For every success story, there are many more failures, where after years of hard work, the company still doesn't succeed, where the managers that look like idiots are really idiots, and the stock options end up being totally worthless.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#397

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

adamcharnock wrote: post #57

This reminds me of my first job as a developer, age 21. I haven’t shared it before, so here goes... There was a ‘crunch’ coming up at work (i.e. IMHO, bad planning) and so the boss offered everyone a bonus if they performed well. However, the older employees warned me that the criteria for such bonuses were often ill-defined. I therefore pushed for clear achievable objectives. These pre-agreed objectives were promise…

After you pulling a resignation notice as an argument, an experienced boss would instantly know you would not be an asset he could rely on even mid-term, so his best option from a business perspective would be giving you no bonus at all (or the original one), and immediately starting to look for a replacement (and probably firing you).

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#398

Post by danieltillett »

kolbusa wrote: post #227
danieltillett wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but it is not quite so clean. Employers are humans and in my experience they care far more about the people they know (employees) than abstract people (shareholders).

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#399

Post by danieltillett »

gorbachev wrote: post #292
danieltillett wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes the company has no choice as the alternative is everyone loses their job.

I don’t think employees should think of the company as their family, but don’t get into the mindset that all employers treat their employees as disposable cogs.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#400

Post by eecc »

rorykoehler wrote: post #373
eecc wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't expect me or my fellow employees to work past our normal hours [...]. 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. You know, managment will become accustomed to that. My first scuffle with US “work ethics” came when I spent a year in a fairly well-known company and yeah, everyone was enthusiasti…

I am management and I work at a company that is similar to the post you are replying to and I would never get used to it. If someone does get used to it they have serious value issues (same as if employees take bonuses for granted).

Well, unfortunately it’s something inevitable like entropic decay.

The guy that hired me was someone like you, but was kicked out and replaced with a more ambitious gentleman who must have promised to squeeze us more efficiently.

The problem is that if you look beyond the rhetoric and the propaganda, employee well-being are only second-order to measurable and targetable outputs. There always will be someone that promises to achieve objectives in some other manner, and given enough time they will get their chance and ruin everything

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