Comment by anongler000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anongler000 | Hacker News Reader

(ex googler here who has gotten, given, and approved peer bonuses)

A lot of confusion here is coming from how the peer bonuses are awarded so I'll give a brief explanation. You can nominate someone for any reason you like but you provide a justification, their manager sees it and decides if they should approve it or not (almost all are approved). Now the important point is the rules state you can't receive more than one peer bonus for a single thing that you do.

It's almost surely the case that 1.) her manager knew that and the other manager didn't or 2.) she had so many pending when her manager saw it that they thought to ask someone what the rules were. For #2 imagine you are her manager and you see 20 people queued up nominating the same person for the same thing, you are responsible for enforcing the rules (in this case giving your report Google's money, it's in the manager's best interest to _approve_ it since their report will be happier) so you don't want to make a mistake and ask around, then someone tells you 'sorry one bonus per thing they do' and you have to deny all of the rest.

I couldn't applaud her more for the salary spreadsheet she put together (it took serious courage) and the really healthy dialog that it brought (I was glued to it when it came out), but the peer bonus part of the story is almost surely not malicious on her manager's part and I hope she hears that somehow. It'd be really sad for everyone involved if this is just a misunderstanding (the peer bonus part at least).

It looks like a major part of the problem she had with the PB rejections was some kind of hypocrisy or inconsistency which she attributed to racism, especially with all that Ida B. Wells stuff:

> Meanwhile, one of the other people involved, a white dude (good friend I won't name, he can name himself if he wants), was also getting PBs.

> His weren't getting rejected. I told him mine were. He was pissed. Wanted to tell everyone what was happening. I declined.

Personally I think 7 x $150 is such a trivial amount of money that it was a mistake to say anything about it at all, certainly not worth losing one's job over.

Lol, coming to think of it, 7x$150 is my monthly pay!

Where do you live? That makes a big difference.

Absolutely. not everyone on here lives in San Francisco and is paid 100k+ a year.

Yeah, apparently some of these people live in Mountain View and make 250k+ a year.

... but can't buy a decent house for less than $800k. (note: I don't live in CA)

Try $1.5 million.

I live in India - and work for one of the tech giants. Our entire team is split into two - one part in the US and the other here in India. We both do the similar amount of work, in fact the estimates our managers give out for upcoming projects are like 25-50% lesser than the ones in US. Yet, we get paid 1/10th of their annual salary. Not that I complain, just comparing the wage differences!

It's also 12,600 times Steve Job's salary when he was CEO.

If you want to make snide jokes you should at least be informed.

Steve Jobs’ salary when he was CEO was $1 http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/technology/1111/gallery....

I think that was exactly the snide joke he was making. ( 7 * 150 * 12 == $12,600 == 12,700 * 1 )

Oh. Woosh.

to be fair he did accrue nearly 3B is stock, a large amount of that was when he took over in 1997.

It's even more a trivial amount of money to risk damaging your company's reputation over. Her manager screwed up royally.

Ugh, that idiotic jump to racism really watered down what was a great post otherwise. She started the spreadsheet AND had a meeting with her manager about it. Of course her PBs are going to be more closely scrutinized than random person X. She pissed off her manager, it's that simple.

Then she went full on asshole and hinted that he should name himself. For what? To prove that a white guy indeed does work at Google who has a manager that approved bonuses?

If you swing a bat at a hornets nest and you get stung more than someone observing from 50 yards away, do you instantly assume it's because the hornets are racist/sexist?

You're getting what you want out of that thread and not what was written:

She had a good friend who helped her create the spreadsheet and his PBs weren't rejected. As in, they both shared the same responsibilities for getting this thing going, but he was being treated differently. She doesn't name him out of respect for his privacy, but later in that thread he names himself.

He was brought in as a point of reference for her claim she was being treated differently.

I don't really understand what happened in the end, but my best guess is that she was finally fired for telling off her manager and calling him/her a racist.

> Shit WILL hit the fan if you tell a racist (a well documented racist) to go fuck themselves though. In defense of the racist, obvi.

No, she created the spreadsheet, she said it herself. She is responsible for sharing it. Other people might have helped after that, but it just doesn't matter. It especially doesn't matter if they were white. They didn't create it.

> you can't receive more than one peer bonus for a single thing that you do.

So how do you explain the coworker getting multiple peer bonuses? Was that manager breaking the rule?

It's not clear to me whether a first PB was even awarded (not counting the vaguely worded one that came later).

That was the manager exercising their discretion (approving a PB is discretionary, usually you'd decline >1 PB for the same thing) in a way that was probably bad.

As proof - i submit the fact that it made Erica feel horrible!

Note: It could also be the other manager didn't notice. PB's are automatically approved after X days if they aren't turned down. It's rare to get > 1 PB for the same thing, so it may be the other manager just didn't pay attention (the system sends email once) or whatever. This would be even more likely if the other manager had a bunch more employees.

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