[HN Gopher] At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: ...
___________________________________________________________________
At one company I worked at only one thing mattered: the yearly
bonus
Author : tosh
Score : 102 points
Date : 2022-04-30 18:58 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| moron4hire wrote:
| Richard Geldreich is a phenomenal asshole. I say this
| confidentially having never worked with him myself, only having
| seen his behavior online. I've seen him go on days long crusades
| on Twitter, demanding immediate, impossible actions, calling
| people "granny pornographers", threatening to get people
| blackballed in the game industry, all because one person on an
| open source project copied a single, popular test suite of photos
| into their personal site without understanding the obscure
| background of one of the photos contained within it. Continuing
| his attack on people's characters long after said person removed
| the photo in a completely reasonable, not-online-24/7 amount of
| time. Expanding his attacks to anyone who would dare ask him if
| he was maybe going a little bit overboard.
|
| While I have heard some complaints from a small minority of
| people about the working culture at Valve, I wouldn't use
| anything Richard Geldreich says on the issue as evidence towards
| it. If you follow him for a while, you realize that all of his
| stories (and there are a lot of them) of how hateful every
| working environment he's been in all have a common denominator:
| Richard Geldreich himself.
| daenz wrote:
| Ad hominem attack.
| moron4hire wrote:
| No, it's evidence that he over reacts to minor issues,
| marking his criticisms in general as not particularly
| trustworthy.
| daenz wrote:
| I don't know either of you, so I don't have a dog in a
| fight. But when you start a post off with " so and so is a
| phenomenal asshole", You should know that a reasonable
| person reads that as an ad hominem attack, regardless of
| how you intended it.
| Justin_K wrote:
| Behavior follows compensation
| agumonkey wrote:
| Oh this is fascinating to me. Since I joined the workforce back 5
| years ago (non IT and IT) I've witnessed so much bs on every
| side. Everything he describes I've seen. People spend more time
| tricking the game than I'd ever thought possible. That said I'm
| shocked devs are playing too since they have a comfy life. I
| guess it just taps into the same primitive reptilian brain
| reflexes.
| pizza234 wrote:
| > That said I'm shocked devs are playing too since they have a
| comfy life. I guess it just taps into the same primitive
| reptilian brain reflexes.
|
| An interesting firsthand view on the dynamics of the
| motivations comes from HN post from some times ago
| (https://frantic.im/leaving-facebook). Some excerpts:
|
| > The salary is high. Facebook aims to pay top 5% compensation
| in the market (we'll get back to that). This makes a lot of
| other things very comfortable: you can go to a restaurant
| without worrying too much about the bill, get a nicer car, a
| nicer house, better stuff.
|
| > The benefits are top notch. Almost every doctor I visited
| said "wow" when looking at the health insurance. It's very
| comfortable to know that you are likely not going to receive a
| huge bill for doing an ultra sound for a routine checkup.
|
| > Then there's the Prestige. Facebook gets a lot of blame in
| media lately, but in everyday life it's still very prestigious
| place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is
| easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line.
|
| All the benefits above, in one way or another, are relative1
| ("niceR" car, not "nice" car) so ultimately, it's a matter of
| aspiring because aspiring, rather than aspiring to reach a
| certain level.
|
| So unfortunately, being a developer with a comfy life tends not
| to have an effect on ethics.
|
| Note: the above statements give an unfair image of the
| author/full article; the extracts are only meant to give an
| idea of certain dynamics.
|
| 1=with bottom limits; being too poor certainly hurts.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| When we have gotten to the point where 5 years of bonus might
| very well give you an entirely feasible retirement nest egg,
| I'm not surprised people go to great lengths to game it. Most
| of us go our entire careers to build the retirement fund that
| some people get in 5 years at Google.
| daenz wrote:
| Many people are highlighting the zero-sum nature of bonuses. I
| wonder how much of this problem goes away if bonuses are no
| longer zero-sum. In theory, it shouldn't even cost the business
| more money, because everyone who meets the bonus requirements
| should get a bonus, in either system.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| I think a large part of the problem is that bonuses are often
| based on comparables, so the bonus requirement is being in the
| top 10% of people.
|
| That is technically a requirement, but still zero sum.
| __derek__ wrote:
| > If you want to see how crazy and mental tech people can get,
| start making the bulk of their income dependent on 6-7 figure
| bonuses.
|
| This is unrelated to "tech" people. It's a common trope for shows
| about bankers, attorneys, consultants, etc.
| krallja wrote:
| The only bonus I have ever received which didn't make me feel
| scummy was profit-sharing. Most companies don't do it because
| profit is for the owners. Everything else just feels like a way
| to decide whether or not to pay me what I'm worth after I've
| already done the work
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| jewel wrote:
| You can make the profit sharing bonus proportional to salary.
| So if there is 100k available for bonuses and your quarterly
| payroll is $1M, then pay everyone a 10% bonus. You still have
| to set salaries correctly but that's a problem whether there
| is a bonus or not.
|
| I've seen this work well at a small software company. It paid
| out once a quarter for anyone who had been there a year.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > we have to measure what your individual contribution to the
| company's profits was
|
| we do?
| t_mann wrote:
| Well, we gotta find _some_ way to split it, we could use
| any metric though, true. We could pay everyone equally, or
| make it a lottery, or donate it to charity in the employees
| ' names, or whatever you can think of. But we have to make
| a decision.
| sofixa wrote:
| At my previous employer it was first proportional on tenure,
| and then switched to just divided to everyone equally.
| password4321 wrote:
| Wow, that would have been quite the transition!
| t_mann wrote:
| And how were those perceived by employees? Genuinely just
| curious.
| jameshart wrote:
| At Wrox Press during the dotcom era editorial staff were
| comped with direct sales-derived royalties. Was the most
| connected I have ever been to a metric that clearly mattered
| to the business.
|
| There were some perverse incentives - people wanted to work
| on bestsellers, there was jockeying for credit for carryover
| work from previous editions, but in general it promoted a
| creative energy around trying to publish hit books, editors
| had a good deal of direct ownership that could actually
| impact the product they were shipping, and the scheme even
| helped align you on the same team as authors, whose
| compensation is also royalty driven - where for many other
| publishers author royalties are almost in conflict with what
| the publisher wants from the deal.
|
| Such a direct unit sales driven profit share is hard to
| imagine engineering into many other businesses but it's
| always stood out to me as a remarkably powerful model.
| t_mann wrote:
| Yeah, everywhere that's close to sales it's usually
| possible to attribute revenue shares directly. But even in
| those organizations a lot of people will be doing work that
| can't be directly measured (IT, accounting,...), so either
| you cut those people out of bonuses or you find some
| metrics to include them.
| jameshart wrote:
| Editorial work is not close to sales. It's upfront
| product development work.
|
| What Wrox did, though, was very clearly assign editors to
| book projects. You worked on one book at a time - each
| book was a little startup venture that shipped a product
| at the end.
| toast0 wrote:
| Editorial work is close to sales in that it's clear that
| editorial quality impacts sales and it can be clear who
| did the editorial work on an item that sold. (Depends on
| the editorial process though, if you do a lot of group
| work, maybe it's hard to say who did how much).
|
| As opposed to IT work where sure, if the editors computer
| doesn't work, it's hard for them to do their editing, but
| there's not much connection to a specific item.
| GoOnThenDoTell wrote:
| Ive never really understood bonuses for engineers, just provide
| more base pay
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| servercobra wrote:
| I agree. My view is if I don't get 100% bonus, I'm leaving to
| find a company that will pay me 100%. It seems like a good way
| to lose your best engineers.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Since it's so hard to fire people, it's better for the company
| to have 50% of your salary as a bonus.
|
| Even most people that are doing nothing can probably do nothing
| somewhere else for 100% or their salary.
|
| If you do nothing at the company, they can pay you $0 bonus and
| hope you get mad and quit and go do nothing somewhere else
| instead.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| 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 1 guaranteed dollar, but this is obviously
| highly dependent on the company/sector)
| exdsq wrote:
| 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.
| b8 wrote:
| Hedge funds are an example of the bonus impact because most pay
| out the majority of their employees TC via bonuses and from what
| I've read tends to lead to a high stress work environment. I can
| understand how bonuses could be intended to be for incentives to
| deliver work and perhaps as golden handcuffs (RSU bonuses that
| require a couple of years to vest etc), but yeah there's pitfalls
| etc.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > Programmers will purposely subtly sabotage key utility
| functions, methods, or systems to prevent their bonus competitors
|
| This seems like a potentially self-destructive way to accomplish
| this. Not sure what company he is referring to, but at all I have
| worked at, this would be filed as a bug report and a quick git
| blame tells you all you need to know. Over time, if your name
| keeps coming up in that commit log, you'll get a bad reputation
| and your code in particular will acquire a smell ("Oh Bob, wrote
| this code... better be careful here," etc.)
| lordnacho wrote:
| 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?
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| No matter which measures you choose, as soon as you tie
| financial incentives to them, people will find ways to pervert
| what they're supposed to measure. That observation is so
| general that there's even a name for it:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| SEJeff wrote:
| Big end of year bonuses are par for the course (in addition to a
| nice salary) in finance. I've worked as an engineer in the
| industry for close to 15 years.
| hahaxdxd123 wrote:
| Finance (I'm thinking prop trading) seems different from Valve.
| You eat what you kill - if you're sabotaging team members
| you're not making money.
|
| If you're at Valve, you can count on your monopoly still
| printing money while you carve out pieces of the pie for
| yourself. Any negative effects from your work will be felt
| years later when you're long gone.
| Mr_P wrote:
| If you replace the word "bonus" with "promo", then you
| unfortunately get an eerily-accurate reflection of the state of
| FAANG companies.
| wbl wrote:
| 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.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Sadly it's only gotten more true over time. As FAANG growth
| slows, the internal politics grows. Bezos was right that having
| a 2 pizza team really is a recipe for success, larger than that
| you end up with internal infighting and stepping on top each
| other.
| mabbo wrote:
| 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 service as a basic key value store database.
| They already called this service for the correct functionality,
| so they had access keys. The stuff he was storing _could be
| argued_ to _kind of_ make sense, but as the owners of this
| service we said "no fucking way, we aren't your database". He
| escalated to management who knew he was going to quit if he
| didn't get his promo. They overruled and last I heard that
| service was still being used as that asshole's database. He did
| promise to fix it right after the project launched, but the
| second he had his promo he changed orgs.
|
| For some reason, Amazon is full of this sort of terrible tech
| debt and they can't figure out why everyone has to be on
| terrible on call rotations.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| 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 junior level work which we end up having to rip
| out later, and then leave to their next high-paying gig.
| raincom wrote:
| Do people leave FAANG jobs every three months? I thought
| they stay there for three years to get promotions and then
| leave
| civilized wrote:
| They take three years to do the three months of junior-
| level work.
| pavlov wrote:
| This is entirely the fault of the FAANG hiring methods of
| which most managers at these companies are very proud
| because they provide such excellent "signal".
|
| But the upside is that it's a competitive advantage for
| startups that intentionally build different hiring
| pipelines.
| wreath wrote:
| 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?
| mabbo wrote:
| 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.
| civilized wrote:
| No, this person was inconsiderate of their fellow employee.
| Employees are supposed to cooperate, not exploit one
| another for their own personal gain.
|
| It's weird to have to say this, and some people probably
| think it's naive, but I stand by it.
| mertd wrote:
| Internal systems always have large gaping holes like that
| because if someone is misusing it, you can simply ask them
| to stop it. Most adults comply.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| It's an internal service, you don't treat your co-workers
| as hostile actors.
| solveit wrote:
| At a large enough company you kind of have to... as this
| situation shows.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Money is clearly a factor, but I think a lot of it comes down
| to culture in the working group. Promotions mean status
| upgrades, and in a lot of these companies, status is actually
| important.
|
| At least at Microsoft, there's a culture of where your title
| determines if you're a part of the "in group" or not. Not at
| least Senior? Forget about anyone outside your immediate
| working group taking you seriously, let alone deferring to your
| judgement on things. Not at least Principal? Put your ambitions
| aside, because you won't be allowed to make decisions that are
| actually important. There's exceptions to this, like if you're
| in charge of something nobody else thinks they understand.
|
| As a result, this means that there's a lot of squabbling and
| weirdness around September. Especially in the Senior ->
| Principal jump, since that is also influenced a lot by
| department budget. There's also not any official
| acknowledgement of a good terminal level. Implicitly, that's
| the Senior band (and really the 2nd level within the band),
| because beyond that you're usually expected to do more than
| just be a wildly productive individual contributor. But
| everyone who's Senior eventually feels the pressure to somehow
| level up to Principal, because they have the expertise to make
| important decisions but their organization often won't allow
| them to be in the room where those decisions are made. Thus the
| backstabbing, jealousy, weirdness, and more.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is a perpetual problem for any organization with a
| hierarchy - and taking care to have successful off-ramps for
| those who want to continue to contribute without being forced
| into a management track is important.
|
| It's gotten better but there's still limitations, and many
| people solve it by switching organizations- which has more
| costs than many realize.
| sombremesa wrote:
| Yep. The best time to get a promotion is as you interview. The
| second best time is now...at another company.
|
| Thankfully, at a large company with plenty of hard problems to
| solve (and smart folks to work with), you can grow quite a lot
| whether or not the company chooses to recognize said growth.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| A lot of companies boot you out if you don't get a promo. The
| idea is that you take the "worst" 10% of your workforce (where
| "worst" means not getting promos), and fire them, every year.
| Even if you have no desire in chasing the promo train for more
| money, you sort of need to play along, just to have a job in a
| year or two.
| ido wrote:
| I believe what you are describing is called stack ranking and
| has fallen out of favor with tech companies. Microsoft at
| least used to do that (I think they don't anymore).
| toast0 wrote:
| It was kind of a mix of stack ranking, fire X% on a
| periodic schedule, and up or out, you've got X years to get
| promoted or you'll be fired. Microsoft _says_ they stopped
| stack ranking, but it 's not clear if they did. Facebook
| _says_ they don 't force a ratings curve, but they did
| while I was there. Just because something has fallen out of
| favor and companies acknowledge that it's fallen out favor
| doesn't mean they don't do it.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's pretty useful if you're an up and coming growth
| company paying higher than average comp as it ensures
| you're continually snatching new employees from other
| companies.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| conflating symptoms and carriers here
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| 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 isn't going to
| change that.
| CPLX wrote:
| 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.
| t_mann wrote:
| 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.
| vsareto wrote:
| Yearly bonuses can carry a large amount of risk for the time
| and work invested, especially if you've traded base salary
| for it (which could go into investments). And the bonuses are
| not as transparent or regulated as even risky investments.
| The real problem with them is the year long bet. Do it
| quarterly or monthly, and I'm all for it.
|
| There are situations where it definitely makes sense, like if
| you're pretty secure without the bonus, you're friendly with
| the people deciding the bonuses, the base salary is high
| enough, there is some guaranteed minimum bonus, and you don't
| burn out trying to attain/maximize it.
|
| Ultimately, you can't get away from the fact that some
| financial health is at the whim of persons within the company
| and frankly they just aren't going to care as much about it
| as you do. It's very much a gamble instead of a solid
| investment.
| ipaddr wrote:
| When you count on that bonus that came last year it could
| mean that mortgage goes under.
|
| Making a lot of money is great until it doesn't come for
| whatever reason.
| t_mann wrote:
| By 'paying off your mortgage' I obviously meant repaying
| the principal plus interest in full, not meeting your
| regular payments.
|
| It should go without saying that you shouldn't take out a
| mortgage where you can't afford the regular payments out of
| your regular income. Banks are very unlikely to grant you
| such a loan anyway.
| astrange wrote:
| That's not a problem in California because it's not possible
| to buy anything to get the mortgage in the first place.
| supernovae wrote:
| that's gambling, not wages.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| At the companies where the bonuses could reasonably be that
| high, I'd probably rather have stock options - because those
| are contractually mine.
| coliveira wrote:
| No company will give you options from day one. They will
| give them over several years if you meet their
| expectations, which is essentially the same as a bonus.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Yes, obviously, but what is promised to me is still
| contractual in time and amount precisely.
| m12k wrote:
| 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)
| ffhhj wrote:
| Yeah, around a decade ago this also made the news:
|
| "Valve fires Jeri Ellsworth, who was developing Steam Box game
| controllers"
| razh wrote:
| Yep, he posted a similar set of tweets back in 2018:
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless...
| secondcoming wrote:
| I thought it might have been why the Windows UI is such a mess.
| exdsq wrote:
| Just coming to say that - he's not the best at keeping things
| secret lol.
| daenz wrote:
| There's a difference between keeping a secret, and avoiding
| legal trouble by not specifically naming an employer.
| nindalf wrote:
| 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 at being coy helpful? It's clear from his bio that
| he's only worked at one such company. So it's abundantly
| clear to everyone who he's working for.
|
| In reality, this pattern ("worked for a large software-
| advertising company with a double O in it's name") is
| fucking annoying. It's designed to make the reader curious
| and more likely to read the rest of what's written. It's
| similar to clickbait in that sense. And I wish to God it
| would stop. I'd request people to please just name names,
| or keep it yourself.
| moron4hire wrote:
| It's very likely that Valve is a major client of his
| current business. Geldreich builds and licenses a texture
| compression system that can supposedly outperform
| anything else on the market.
| rhexs wrote:
| 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.
| devwastaken wrote:
| American civil system is not based on merit or reason.
| Anyone can file for any reason, any decent lawyer can
| make some claims that will require you to argue against,
| else they be automatically defaulted to true and you
| lose. It doesn't matter if the big corp wins or not, the
| toll it takes on you is threat enough.
|
| This isn't about civil disputes anyways. No employer
| wants to see a prospective new hire trash talking their
| previous company. Doesn't matter if it's deserved or not,
| it's seen as a liability.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| Hahaha yeah you know what start with this exact preamble
| next time you're a plaintiff telling the judge why you
| deserve money. "The American civil system is not based on
| merit or reason." I would say it is in fact based on both
| of those, but more than anything on _judgment_.
| CPLX wrote:
| Or just maintaining plausible deniability.
|
| I would certainly have a different opinion about someone
| saying negative things about me in anonymous generic terms
| that people paying attention could figure out, vs using my
| name and posting direct criticism. As would most people I
| think.
| sundvor wrote:
| Heard that's not necessarily enough, "not specifically
| naming".
| daenz wrote:
| IANAL but would love a lawyer to chime in. My
| understanding was that you could indeed get in trouble if
| you don't cast enough ambiguity around the identity of
| the person/company you are trashing, but casting some
| ambiguity is better than none.
| rhexs wrote:
| 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.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| This reminds me of the structure used at many high frequency
| trading firms today. The nature of the work in quant work is
| different and likely much easier to tie to financial output. But
| the bonuses can sometimes even go up to 5x the base:
| https://www.levels.fyi/company/Hudson-River-Trading/salaries...
| 300bps wrote:
| Another thing that happens that I didn't see mentioned is that
| people at higher levels will only allow incompetent people to be
| promoted to their level.
|
| If they allowed the best people to get promoted to their level,
| it would adversely impact their own bonuses and career. So
| instead they fight to get incompetent people promoted to their
| level so they have no competition.
| t_mann wrote:
| He does mention it at the hiring stage.
| otikik wrote:
| Referral bonuses are ok. The rest of the bonuses... naah not for
| me
| krasin wrote:
| Small peer bonuses work well for "going above and beyond". But
| they are not common.
| tayo42 wrote:
| I don't get why you need to sabotage others? Does your bonus size
| shrink if others get a bonus or something?
| randyrand wrote:
| yes. that's pretty typical. managers get a lump sum to
| distribute among the team, at least at Apple.
| cornel_io wrote:
| 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.
| solenoidalslide wrote:
| All those managers seem to think it's a good enough motivator
| to keep it around.
| masklinn wrote:
| It's certainly a good way to have a lot of monkeys jumping
| when you say so.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Bonus pool competition is typically zero sum. For you to get
| more, someone must get less.
| cornel_io wrote:
| 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.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Stack ranking (aka performance calibration)
| lesgobrandon wrote:
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