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Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

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Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#521

Post by marcinzm »

musingsole wrote: post #477
benhurmarcel wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but what can you do about it? It's a direct consequence of building large/complex products. To me it seems that you're just advocating for only building small/simple products. Typically you have a chief engineering team that is in charge to strike that balance, and drive the compromises with all the specialists.

Have Special Teams & Product Teams. 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 tam…

So how do you measure the value and contribution of the product and special teams including compared to each other. Somehow promotions, head count, budget and so on needs to allocated. Without ownership or the ability to veto it's not fair to measure the Special Teams on any product related metrics. But if you can't measure them on product related metrics then what do you measure them on? Feedback by other teams which will result in endless games of politics?

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#522

Post by hallway_monitor »

onemiketwelve wrote: post #366
faeyanpiraat wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really shouldn’t feel bad, because what happened has a low probability. It’s like saying I should’ve invested in X which got quadrupled in price last year. Most stocks (even very promising ones) didn’t achieve anywhere near that growth. So you choosing the right one among the many to “shut up and stick to it just a little bit longer” has a low chance of exceptional returns on your investment. You cannot see the f…

Exactly. This is like being dealt a horrible set of cards in poker and kicking yourself for folding. Let's say you got 2,7 and then found out the cards on the table turned out to be the rest of the 2s. Folding was still the right move

I wonder how widely the concept of expected value is discussed outside of poker or statistics. Simple concept, but it can really help with all kinds of decisions in life.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#523

Post by kaba0 »

forgingahead wrote: post #518
kaba0 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Attitude" is a key part of it, and I guarantee you the vast majority of all hiring managers everywhere would eliminate a candidate if they demonstrated high entitlement during the interview process. I do agree with you that not only technical abilities are considered, for good reason. But not standing up for ourselves and letting us being bullied and exploited by higher ups is not an attitude in my book. We may ha…

Certainly, there are plenty of exploitative bosses and we should definitely encourage people to stand up for themselves. I provide new hires with several books, one of which is a book on personal finances that includes a chapter on negotiating a higher salary. It's important to me that people are empowered in their work and their lives. But this is not the story of the comment I was engaging with. The original commen…

I do respect your opinion on the topic and you seem to just look at the story from the employer’s point of view, as opposed to perhaps the majority of people here, who rather “root” for the underdog.

But I still don’t disagree entirely with the quoted part.

> Boss: What's stopping you from doing this every time you don't get your way?

Downscaling the dramatic effect of the exact text a bit, I think the response is fair, if we mean under “don’t get your way” something significant. Like how about a transfer to a different building? A good boss should ask a given employee beforehand, whether it is feasible for him/her, but if it was already decided and the employee can’t have a say, pretty much resignation is the only “tool” he/she can leverage. Even at pay negotiation, while seldom brought up explicitly, resigning is there implicitly.

All in all, I think talking about the exact incident is fruitless, because we only got an anecdotal story without both sides, so I think you and I “drew” the rest of the story differently.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#524

Post by icedchai »

zepto wrote: post #193
donw wrote: post #161

Earlier 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…

> Nowadays, stock options given to employees often end up being worth nothing, even on a successful exit. This seems unlikely. Exits and IPOs have much greater valuations now than they did ‘back in the day’ so far more early employees end up with a significant infusion of cash.

You need to consider that a very, very small percentage of companies have IPOs.

Many "successful" exits are actually acqui-hires, where a larger company acquires a dead or dying company for its talent. Often the product from that company is immediately shutdown, or at least shelved and no longer actively developed.

Other "successful" exits pay some percentage back to the recent preferred shareholders. Earlier investors are not made whole. Common shareholders generally get nothing.

Founders will still spin these "exits" a positive because they didn't have to shut down. The reality is the venture was a failure. Employees got jobs... that they could've had anyway.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#525

Post by Cogito »

ganafagol wrote: post #344
jboy55 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a company that instituted a very similar bonus program, it started just after the time the former COO of Ebay joined ... must have been coincidence. Anyways, we had similar formulas, pretty much the same thing. We were eligible for 6% of our salary but it would be paid out in 4 times a year in 2 different ways. Our bonus was split in two, half would be used for quarterly bonuses, half would be used for ye…

Sounds like lots of time wasted for coming up with such a complicated scheme, communicating it and everybody thinking through how to maximize their own benefit from it. Sounds like the articles point. But on steroids. All it does is keep people from doing actual work and be happy doing so. This is just infighting waiting to happen.

It's fairly standard, in my experience, and makes sense if you come form the position of the company.

In the budget a certain amount of money is allocated towards the incentive scheme. If the company does not perform as well as planned this pool is reduced appropriately (you can't pay bonuses with money that doesn't exist).

If you take the original pool of money you can express it as a percentage of the entire payroll, and that percentage is what, on average, everyone's bonus will be (for example 6%). Alternatively, that percentage is used to calculate what the pool will be in the first place (before scaling for company performance).

You then have the individual perfomance scaling, which is designed to reward people excelling at their job. The individual has a starting percentage-of-salary bonus, and that percentage is moderated up or down depending on how they performed relative to their peers. Relative to their peers is super important here, because the total bonus pool was worked out based on the starting percentages (and then moderated by company performance) so the final bonuses are really just an allocation of that pool between the employees. In some companies managers will literally take their employees' performance reveiws into a big round-table meeting where they argue why specific team members should receive a 4 or 5 rating (the highest), as there are a limited number of 4s and 5s available in the incentive scheme.

The final calculation is fairly straightforward then.

From the company's perspective, an individual's bonus is = (total payroll) * (incentive scheme budget allocation percentage) * (company performance factor) * ([potentially] business unit or department performance factor) * (individual performance factor)

For the individual it's built up in reverse, and it's the accountants jobs to make sure the numbers match in the end!

bonus = (employee salary) * (base bonus percentage +- individual performance modifier) * (company performance factor) * ([potentially] business unit or department performance factor)

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#527

Post by laurent92 »

hallway_monitor wrote: post #522
onemiketwelve wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This is like being dealt a horrible set of cards in poker and kicking yourself for folding. Let's say you got 2,7 and then found out the cards on the table turned out to be the rest of the 2s. Folding was still the right move

I wonder how widely the concept of expected value is discussed outside of poker or statistics. Simple concept, but it can really help with all kinds of decisions in life.

Hi all 3 parents, I agree!

1. It’s incredibly good that the startup founders were actually honest (no last-moment dilution),

2. Stock valuation is poker, although a bit more when you know the company from inside,

3. I’m incredibly thankful towards the owners (Although I’ll hide their name because I don’t have perfect reputation),

4. I’m incredibly thankful towards the economic system which allows us to get at least that.

I just wanted to give an example where leaving early wasn’t the perfect choice. But it was as optimized as could be.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#529

Post by mattm »

xref wrote: post #223

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)

I just recently finished "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal" It was really well researched and written.

Re: Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit

#530

Post by kvz »

jrockway wrote: post #40

> I remember being in shouting matches with our signal integrity team about among other things, how many capacitors we needed. I think the place where big companies go wrong is by having teams that are too specialized. If you're the Signal Integrity team, the only thing you care about is signal integrity. You should just say no to anything but the most conservative arrangement possible; you're responsible for Signal…

Couldn’t you make the objective of the team: highest reliability for lowest cost?
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