Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

(As an aside - I wonder whether this more correctly reflects companies making people "salary" as a means to pay them less overall for working long hours. I've seen "salary" be given to people making less than 33k usd/year, pre-minimum wage increases. Might be a rarity on HN.)

My takeaway has been that these incentive schedules aren't properly implemented. Also, people get very toxic if they see others making more or less pay than themselves. Yearly bonuses based on global factors are nice, but probably are too far from what an individual adds to the business to properly impact their work effort. You want the worker doing marginal thinking with marginal incentives - i.e. the classic paying car salespeople a commission on each sale. This is clearly a more difficult calculation for the IT field.

One idea - pay the bonus per pay period. This addresses people sticking around for a once per year bonus and then quitting. It could be based on the last year's (or quarter's - depending on the business) figures, for instance. Maybe have it be known the full, remaining bonus will be paid out if the person leaves on great terms during the year. i.e. Absolutely no one in your department - not even the custodian staff - has a negative thing to say about your performance.

Another - rethink paying people salary. Salaried employees can be pushed to work OT. But if people can make 1.5x pay for doing demonstrably important work (say, presenting it during the next team meeting) then they'll naturally work those additional hours. It's up to the business to figure out the hourly pay rate correctly, of course. Also, pushing people to work OT as a standard practice generates lots of toxic behavior - another reason to not use that as a standard practice.

Another - pick a metric that definitively impacts your business and is easily measured and high visibility. Use that to determine the next pay period's bonus. i.e. "Everyone in the IT department gets a $300 bonus if system uptime is greater than 98% for the previous two weeks. The bonus decreases by 1% for every percent decrease in uptime from 98% over the preceding two weeks. i.e. you're getting (100%-18%) of the 300$ if the uptime was more like 80% the last two weeks.

A set bonus is part of your employment compensation. It's not a "nice to have". If the company hits its goals and you perform well, you are supposed to get it. When this is broken, that's a problem, and it indicates a deception by the company.

Yes, if you want you could just increase all salaries by that much and not worry about the bonuses. The reason they come in a bonus structure is two-fold: so the company can not pay it out if they don't hit goals; because management has the idea that it will make people work harder. Both of these reasons serve the company alone, don't act like this is a case of employees feeling entitled.

What does it mean to "do your job"?

At every place I've worked there was an infinite amount of job to be done. If I were to take 4 months off I would do less of it than if I've taken 1 month.

So that just shifts the conversation from "how much vacation you have" to "what amount of work is considered enough". Which doesn't seem all that different to me, or at least it would not have been at any place I've worked at.

Special Teams don't get ownership of anything, can't veto anything. They're there to answer any and all questions from the product team and to set the stage for how the product team may solve a challenge (i.e. present a menu of relevant approaches with expert commentary on the applicability to the problem, but implementation is the product team's job).

This limbo position helps tamp down on the prestige of a Special Team relative to Product while still attempting to harness expert value.

It is a really fun experiment which they replicated in different cultures and got vastly different results. Even both extremes of the spectrum are good ways to describe expected behaviour in some cultures.

In some places, the first person would take all the money, and the second would happily accept that split. He could have been first after all and would have done the same thing. In other places, the first person would give everything to the second, who would still reject this split. Neither wants to receive money 'undeserved' by being lucky in getting first or second.

All participants would describe their local approach as fair, despite the split definitely not being equal.