Comment by ccortes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ccortes | Hacker News Reader

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Oh man I hate bonuses so much. At my last job we had a monthly bonus that made up to 33% of our total income. These were based on certain KPIs we had to achieve. The thing is, everyone can cheat the KPIs. Even more so if such a big part of your income relies on it.

I also felt they killed creativity and intellectual freedom completely. You were not able anymore to work on something else that you'd consider more important because the targets for the bonus were set. I found some fraudulent users who were using our product but instead of doing something about it I decided to just keep in line with what was expected from me after talking about it and having discussions about it with my manager.

So instead of acting on the values and mission of the company, the culture was to chase the money, and you could see it and feel it everywhere.

Worth noticing, at the beginning there were no bonuses but management wanted us to have some 'skin on the game'. I think they blew it by making it such a big percentage.

I went through the same thing in my previous work (consulting firm). Management set up monthly targets related to billing enough hours to the clients (something like 85% in average in our team of 5).

Most of the time we met the criteria even if not everyone was making the target. Usually, 4 were 100% billable while 1 was the anchor :).

One month, I spent a fair amount of time of documenting something because it was the 3rd time that the same errors were showing up so I told to my manager to decrease the target for that month. It was agreed and understood by everyone that the target could be lowered when required (leave, training, etc ...). Except that my manager refused to lower the target so I spent 3 months talking to CEO/CFO to get this bonus paid (more for my colleagues than for me) but I never managed to convince them. So the same feeling as you described kicked in in the team. People started to work only billable hours, neglecting everything else to make sure we met the target all the time.

I obviously left this company after a serious discussion with my manager. I still remember sending an ultimate email asking for the bonus on my last Friday at 4pm.

So yes, give a decent comp and say that bonuses might be paid if the company is performing well. If they are ever paid, I will take my family for a nice dinner and buy some books with them. Else than fine, my mortgage is not in danger!

I've had my variable annual bonus converted into a permanent salary increase.

I will say I like this a lot more.

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