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Comment by bloblaw | Hacker News Reader

On the face of it this sounds like a good idea, but I see some problems. For example, this presumes that others can understand the value of my contributions.

If I can accomplish something in 2 hours that takes someone else 16 hours....I could very likely go unnoticed. But if I bring donuts for everyone every Friday I bet I get a bigger bonus because people really like me.

My concern is this exchanges reward for actions highly visible to your boss, to reward for actions highly visible to your peers. A combination of the two would be preferable to me

Actually, this already exists in many companies and it's known as "360 feedback" where your co-workers (in and out of your dept) are asked their opinion of your performance before your review. This feedback is factored in to your review.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback

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Shopify employee here - Unicorn makes accomplishments highly visible to both your boss and colleagues. The bonus is that if you do something for a colleague, your boss will find out via Unicorn rather than you having to say anything.

My point is that "Unicorn" is a reporting tool. It still takes peers (instead of just your manager, aka the "old way) to understand and accurately value your contribution.

My concern is that not all actions are equal, but the recognition seems to be.

My question is do I get more "points" for fixing the thread dispatcher in the kernel...or do I get just as many for helping you understand how to upload a file to Sharepoint?

That's where you can disenfranchise people. However, I like the idea and to me it is a good step in implementing 360 feedback as part of a review and bonus allocation.

IMHO, combine peer feedback as an equal component of bonus allocation along with management assessment and I think then you have a winner.

You get more for fixing the thread dispatcher:

"Everyone in the company sees [your] plaudits and can pile on more unicorns if they agree that [you] did an awesome job."

The only person who will be impressed by you helping Bob upload to SharePoint is Bob. Total score: 1-3 unicorns.

Every engineer will be impressed that you fixed the thread dispatcher. Total score: 1-3 unicorns * # of engineers.

Sounds great in theory, but that assumes that every engineer is spending time every day monitoring all of the accomplishments by every other engineer just to make sure everything gets valued appropriately. I suppose the answer to that is, "Well, you (or somebody) could tell everybody that you did this wonderful thing," but then you're right back in the position of having to do self-promotion to get recognition for your work.

Shopify intern here.

I've worked Unicorn in to my daily workflow. I can't say everyone (or even anyone) else uses my system, but Unicorn is my first stop of the day when I sit down at my desk. I look over all the unicorns from the previous day, distribute points as I see fit, and move on with my day. Rinse and repeat daily.

It takes all of ~2-3 minutes out of my day. I can see how this technique wouldn't scale well once employee numbers get too big, but it seems to work well at ~100 employees.

What he's saying is that the Unicorn system results in "highly visible/likely to be rewarded by others" work being prioritized by employees over the work that is actually most important to the company.

No one is making a living off the bonus system, so it's unlikely to actually motivate what task you work on.

Votes are also private, including how many votes something has received (except to the person being rewarded). I really haven't noticed any gaming of the system.

The biggest part of the reward is recognition. The money is nice, but as I said, no one is retiring based on it.

Is there pressure on employees who don't give out Unicorns very often? It seems like a very valuable currency.

Nope. The funds allocated to them just go back into the next payment cycle’s pool.

There’s an email/newsletter that’s auto-generated every few weeks that summarizes what’s going on and makes it easy to remember to spread some unicoin around.

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