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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a great idea and if it works in practice, great. It's the sort of idea that could cause bad feelings to fester with the wrong group of people though. [Warning: gross generalizations ahead..] Think what happens when grumpy-but-reliable "server guy" doesn't ever get any bonuses because people don't understand what he does while "pretty girl on reception who buys candy bars for everyone on Thursday" does OK, etc.

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Sure. I guess the implementation would be important. The screenshot toward the end of the 37s post suggests that employees have an opportunity to advertise their accomplishments, to which their peers can then respond with fractional portions of their available bonus funds. My guess is that accomplishments that demonstrably move this business forward may get exceedingly large payouts, but that wouldn't preclude server guy or Shopify's 71-year old office manager from getting regular (if smaller) disbursements.

This would be less of an issue with a smaller team like Shopify. As you get bigger you're right, it starts to become a popularity contest. At < 30 employees though, everyone knows who is making real contributions.

I work at a company with ~30 employees, and I can tell you that you're not always right.

There's certainly a lot of gossip and speculation, but at 30 people there's enough division that it's not automatically obvious that any given person is doing something worthwhile.

I suppose that depends on how you define worthwhile, doesn't it?

Rewards encourage behaviour that earns them.

But that's exactly the problem with the 'unicorn' idea - the appearance of contributing to the company is more valuable than actually doing it.

In a very small startup, you're not going to be able to fake it - but by the time the company's at 30ish people, it's not so clear cut. Who's the most valuable developer in my employer? I'm not on the dev team, so I don't know. They all seem to be doing great work, but I don't know the details.

Do we credit the sales guy for landing this big contract, or the operations guys that made sure their trial system worked, or the devs who wrote their custom integration?

If you're not involved in that project, it's going to be hard to judge whose contributions deserve what share of the reward.

Basically, it's a neat reward system, but I don't think it scales very well at all.

If it's tough to fake in small groups, why not just split people into groups. For example, only people who work directly with each other can reward them. Obviously that's a little bit of an oversimplification but I don't see why such a split couldn't be made to work.

For example, only people who work directly with each other can reward them.

How would that apply to HR, accounting, or legal? Not usually the most loved members of any company and they're routinely involved in bureaucratic compliancy tasks that are more necessary than appreciated.

I'll let you know soon. We are over 30 people already ( 2 people started since the interview ).

The point of the system is that for a bonus system to work well the people who give the bonuses need to know about the individual people's contributions. From the company perspective, people who are very helpful to other employees are very valuable and Unicorn rewards this. People who finish big and hard projects are obviously valuable to the entire company and Unicorn rewards this. People who may be solid but are grumpy and don't like to show off their accomplishments... well... If they leave over unicorn and end up being replaced with people who do the things that are rewarded by the system then I'm happy with this outcome.

So far it's been a huge surprise to see where the money goes in Unicorn and I'm thrilled with it.

People who may be solid but are grumpy and don't like to show off their accomplishments... well... If they leave over unicorn and end up being replaced with people who do the things that are rewarded by the system then I'm happy with this outcome.

Do you prefer less-talented, extroverted employees over more-talented, introverted ones?

Being a (hopefully) talented introvert myself I definitely don't optimize for that :-)

I don't think it's fair to see our system so black and white. First of all, i'm sure it has problems. Probably many. However, bonus systems all have problems. The traditional top down, performance review style bonus system definitely works best for the extroverts. From what i've seen of unicorn, the people who are most rewarded are the quiet but helpful kinds.

Also, if unicorn helps to get people into the habit of sharing their accomplishments with their friends and coworkers then I think that's worth it all by itself. You have to share your accomplishments. Everyone loves to work with people who do great stuff. But if those people don't tell you about the great stuff they do then you cannot know about it and you cannot partake.

Any chance of sharing some screen shots or code on how one actually awards accomplishments? Is it like a badge system where there are a set number of achievements, or is it something like a "free form" achievement where one states how it can be solved and a way for the system to know when it has been solved? Is it something like: "Fix bug #30 and get $10"? Or is it something like: "Solve 20 bugs in one week and get $10?"

I'm just thinking of doing something similar for my own little shop too...

I described it below. I think your approach would vastly overcomplicate a system like this. It's essentially a freeform money transfer system. You click on a person, you enter an amount and we have a ledger system that moves the money from your bonus budget into someone else's bonus receivables.

Originally we thought we will have to protect against bonus trading but instead we simply trust our employees as we should. If two people start trading bonuses then this may be a fireable offense.

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