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At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus

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Re: At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus

#21

Post by lr4444lr »

t_mann wrote: post #16
lr4444lr wrote: post #7

The smartest piece of advice I ever got on bonuses: they are part of your salary that your employer reserves the right to discretionarily not pay you. I consider bonuses of absolutely no account in a comp package. If they are given, I happily accept. If not, I have no disappointment. I give the company my diligent efforts because I care about my responsibilities and my colleagues regardless. A carrot on a treadmill i…

You say that now, but once you actually are in such a position and you realize that you could pay off your college debt plus your mortgage in 2-3 years, things might change in your mind.

At the companies where the bonuses could reasonably be that high, I'd probably rather have stock options - because those are contractually mine.

Re: At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus

#25

Post by exdsq »

Agingcoder wrote: post #14
GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #2

Ive never really understood bonuses for engineers, just provide more base pay

It's cheaper for the company, essentially trading mean for variance. Bad years, you have a trivial pay cut (no to low bonus), good years people get money. If you have very high base pay, bad years you lose money. If you're young, volatility is ok. If you're getting older and have kids, then you value certainty a bit more and want higher base pay, but you might make less money overall (say 2 dollars bonus is equal to…

Part of the fun of the Web3 startup scene is that tokens can be liquid out of gate and are basically just a variable in a file to begin with, so trivial to make out of thin air for new hires. There's stories of 20-somethings getting 7 or even 8 figure pay days after 6 months work from a successful launch.

Re: At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus

#26

Post by t_mann »

mistrial9 wrote: post #19
t_mann wrote: post #6

6-7 figure bonuses for mid-20's, or the story of how we got a global financial crisis in '08. Seems to work wonders in tech too.

conflating symptoms and carriers here

Bonuses were not a symptom of the crisis, if you look at what products were at the heart of things like the Lehman Brothers collapse, who created, traded and sold them, and what incentives they had individually, you'll see that those bonuses go right to the heart of the problem.

Re: At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus

#27

Post by coliveira »

GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #2

Ive never really understood bonuses for engineers, just provide more base pay

If they give a base pay increase, then they can't take it from you next year! This is how FAANG companies work, give you a lot of incentives in the form of one time bonus, so if they don't like you they will take most of your future compensation in the next year. They also keep you working as a dog to keep your total compensation from falling.

Re: At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus

#28

Post by masklinn »

lordnacho wrote: post #4

But the bonus is just an incentive mechanism. The question really is what things influenced the bonus award? Sensible things or not so sensible things? Did they tie the bonus to things that the company wanted or not?

> But the bonus is just an incentive mechanism.

Sure. It's an incentive mechanism to be seen as better than your peers.

> The question really is what things influenced the bonus award? Sensible things or not so sensible things? Did they tie the bonus to things that the company wanted or not?

They tied the bonus to "being a top performer":

> Then tie the bonuses to some shadowy and illusory "peer review" system and watch the sparks fly.

But frankly any time bonuses are involved the risks shoot up exponentially. For instance sales are commonly highly bonus-based, and as a result at least in software they will promise any and everything to the client so they can close and get that sweet, sweet bonus, and let everyone else hold the bag when the client finds out there was only a very tenuous relationship between their promises and reality.

Re: At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly bonus

#29

Post by wbl »

Mr_P wrote: post #5

If you replace the word "bonus" with "promo", then you unfortunately get an eerily-accurate reflection of the state of FAANG companies.

I worked at a company where promotion was not on the table. So I left. No matter how much work I did or how good I got, it would not get rewarded and people who wanted to get good and who I could learn from would also leave.

Rewarding people is hard. But you can't shirk from it unless you want people to leave.

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