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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

#81

Post by rhexs »

nindalf wrote: post #45
daenz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between keeping a secret, and avoiding legal trouble by not specifically naming an employer.

Is Valve really going to file a lawsuit against him and argue in court whether this actually happened or not? They're not. Do they even have grounds to file a lawsuit? Likely not, American courts aren't that sympathetic to libel claims. But let's assume for a minute that what you're saying has some merit. Maybe Valve does have grounds to sue. And maybe they're interested in suing. In that case, is this lousy attempt…

American companies always have bored lawyers on staff, and lawsuits are just day-to-day activities for them. Suing costs the company virtually nothing, while defending against that suit as a private party can be ruinously expensive. The company can almost always afford better PR than you can, and relying or hoping your case going viral and the company backing off due to negative PR isn't going to help you sleep at night.

It isn't fair, but that's how it is. Don't poke the bear anymore than you have to. All you have to do is personally anger one executive and they can go after you.

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

#82

Post by supernovae »

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.

that’s gambling, not wages.

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

#83

Post by rhexs »

m12k wrote: post #8

A tech company in Bellevue Washington with a "shadowy and illusory "peer review" system" - this is Valve we're talking about, right? (fits his Twitter bio)

Does Valve really have 7 figure bonuses? That's quite impressive if so. Wonder what it would take to get that -- do you have to launch/invent a new, successful microtransaction store? Can't imagine it's easy based on that twitter thread.

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

#84

Post by civilized »

raincom wrote: post #75
Jasper_ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fast-paced "fail upwards" where you get a new job at a new FAANG every few months while leaving a trail of destruction in your wake astounds me, and I don't understand how it works and how companies keep falling for it. There are a lot of excellent ex-FAANG programmers I've worked with, and a lot of terrible ones, and my experience is that usually the ones with the most prestigious titles show up, do 3 months of…

Do people leave FAANG jobs every three months? I thought they stay there for three years to get promotions and then leave

They take three years to do the three months of junior-level work.

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

#85

Post by drexlspivey »

wreath wrote: post #69
mabbo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good God yes. Once my team owned a service that did X. Among it's functionality, it had an API that, as a side effect, stored some data that could be retrieved. Sadly, this service had no validation that the data being input made any sense in the context of what this service did. A developer on a neighboring team had a big promo project on the go. As a simple hack, and as a way to save time, his project used our serv…

How is this his fault? Your service had poor validation or design and was used in ways it was intended to. You knew this but still didn't patch it?

It’s an internal service, you don’t treat your co-workers as hostile actors.

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

#86

Post by cornel_io »

randyrand wrote: post #18
tayo42 wrote: post #15

I don't get why you need to sabotage others? Does your bonus size shrink if others get a bonus or something?

yes. that’s pretty typical. managers get a lump sum to distribute among the team, at least at Apple.

That's not even stack ranking - managers being assigned a fixed pool of $ to give out for raises and bonuses across their reports (or their branch of the org tree if director or above) is pretty standard at any big company.

It's pretty reasonable if you "ship your org chart" and can easily measure each team's contribution. It's much trickier and more prone to unfair allocation when people switch teams a lot or contribute outside their team, i.e. if one of my engineers went above and beyond and boosted some other team's profits by a bunch, I'm probably not going to get extra money to allocate to my people as a result since the higher level execs don't usually follow credit assignment at that level.

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

#87

Post by mabbo »

wreath wrote: post #69
mabbo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good God yes. Once my team owned a service that did X. Among it's functionality, it had an API that, as a side effect, stored some data that could be retrieved. Sadly, this service had no validation that the data being input made any sense in the context of what this service did. A developer on a neighboring team had a big promo project on the go. As a simple hack, and as a way to save time, his project used our serv…

How is this his fault? Your service had poor validation or design and was used in ways it was intended to. You knew this but still didn't patch it?

I won't downvote you.

When this terrible thing was done, we immediately realized we needed to add validation. We had thought that by limiting who could call through access controls, we'd never have a malicious user. So naive.

Sadly, at that point we couldn't add it because his awful project was running in production.

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

#88

Post by cornel_io »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #23
tayo42 wrote: post #15

I don't get why you need to sabotage others? Does your bonus size shrink if others get a bonus or something?

Bonus pool competition is typically zero sum. For you to get more, someone must get less.

Everything is nearly zero sum when it comes to bonus and salary once you're a level or two below C-level, as it has to be. That's how budgets work, and the only people who get to determine "what % of company cash flow do we want to dedicate to personnel costs?" are pretty high up the ladder.

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

#89

Post by CPLX »

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…

Sure but because that’s true they’re a way for the company to possibly pay quite a bit more.

As someone on the other side of the table who has to make comp decisions, I honestly want to pay the team as much as we can afford while being careful to maintain the financial health of the company. I really do, the more I pay people the more likely they are to feel rewarded and go the extra mile and not quit.

But that can be scary, since you can’t lower comp as a manager, that’s not really possible. If you’re overconfident you can end up in a genuine crisis.

So I pay as much as I know I can afford, and then as a period closes I can look back and pay the extra that I can now be sure I can afford since the results are in.

It’s a mechanism to help me pay the maximum the business can afford. It’s in place to help the team make the most money possible.

Clearly not every situation will be like this. Clearly somehere there’s someone dangling bonuses as a cynical way to exploit people.

But it’s unfair to dismiss the concept out of hand. Especially in volatile lines of business or very fast growing companies.

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

#90

Post by password4321 »

sofixa wrote: post #71
t_mann wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that different? Somehow we have to measure what your individual contribution to the company's profits was, which, unless you work in sales maybe, is going to involve a lot of judgment.

At my previous employer it was first proportional on tenure, and then switched to just divided to everyone equally.

Wow, that would have been quite the transition!
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