7 ms·

Crowdsource Your Company’s Bonuses

72 points by rguzman 14y ago

benjaminwootton 14y ago
I haven't met anyone with a nice word to say about performance reviews. If you are performing well and delivering results, to then have this annual review process which gives you a big list of all of the extraneous areas that you 'need to improve on' can be a complete sap on the old motivation. Especially if it's accompanied by the typical 1-2% pay increment. That can really be a drag.... I've quoted this article on the topic a number of times, but it's spot on IMO - http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/02/mediocrity_by_a.html http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0... If you're going to do them, performance reviews should be about identifying the areas where people are great, and working out how to extract more of that....
- crewtide 14y ago
  Yeah, the biggest issue with management in general (and performance reviews in particular) is that it's focused on what people are doing poorly at/where they need improvement. Good managers find out what each employee is awesome at and get them doing it. If you hire someone and what they love to do and are great at isn't what you need at your company, then you've hired the wrong person. But I know lots of people who left a job because they kept asking to be moved to a different role, different team, etc, and nothing happened. Managers: focus on what each person is great at and loves to do.
  - ironchef 14y ago
    It's a pendulum. If management blows smoke and kissy faces all day at me telling me my poo doesn't stink, that's not helpful. If they only point out what is being done incorrectly, that's not good. A blend between the two plus upward reviews (my opinion) have been best when i've seen them in use. Unfortunately, most companies and people don't design and execute performance reviews well.
- ironchef 14y ago
  "If you're going to do them, performance reviews should be about identifying the areas where people are great, and working out how to extract more of that..." I disagree. Performance reviews should be about performance. They should examine what one excels at and what one does poorly. They should then use those results to improve individuals, teams, and the company. Person alpha is great at TDD? Person bravo sucks at it? Pair 'em up. Similarly the results should influence compensation in a meaningful manner? You blew your results out of the water and only get a 1% raise? That's crap. Management's performance sucks in this case (that's why upward reviews are also key).
  - nowarninglabel 14y ago
    Why do you think pairing person alpha and person bravo will magically result in person bravo acquiring the skills of person alpha? Among all the possibilites, you might just bring person alpha down without improving person bravo at all. Then, you've made everyone more inefficient.
    - ironchef 14y ago
      I didn't state it would magically result in that...i'm sorry if that's what you inferred; however, i've found in the past that good people teaching about some subject tend to learn more about the subject in the teaching of said subject. Like anything else, teaching / mentoring / pairing are skills...those could be horrible as well.
bloblaw 14y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback
- z2600 14y ago
  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.
  - bloblaw 14y ago
    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.
    - dstorrs 14y ago
      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.
zavulon 14y ago
There's also DueProps, who turn this into a game: https://dueprops.com/ https://dueprops.com/
- jturn 14y ago
  http://angel.co/dueprops http://angel.co/dueprops Looks like this is the tool that shopify uses. See the comment from the CEO.
  - xal 14y ago
    DueProps is loosely modelled on Unicorn
tomjen3 14y ago
That is going to work well when the employees starts to gang up together and give each other unicorns in return for their unicorns.
- smackfu 14y ago
  Yeah, we had a little "thanks" program at work that had similar issues. People tended to just reciprocate praise, because it didn't cause any drama, and both people made out.
- therandomguy 14y ago
  I have seen this happen on Yammer. Now tie bonus to that and you have got a worse system than traditional performance reviews.
- hmahncke 14y ago
  Yup - this system gamifies reciprocal altruism, creates cliques and circular thank-you unicorns, and generally sounds de-motivating by quantifying the exact dollar value of a thank you.
- edwardog 14y ago
  I wrote the first version of this at Shopify. We anticipated the need to see this kind of behaviour, so there's clear auditing trails for everything that HR and Accounting can see where the bonus money's going. Having said that, we haven't seen this problem appear yet.
- xal 14y ago
  simple - fireable offence
agentultra 14y ago
I hate bonuses. I'd rather get equity or a bigger salary. I'm shy and I don't like pandering for attention. I just like getting things done, finding ways to make it easier to get things done, and shipping code so I can go enjoy a beer. I could really care less for bureaucracy and competition. It's inefficient.
calinet6 14y ago
Here's an idea: remove all politics from the process completely and do away with performance-oriented bonus systems. They've taken what was essentially a way to make their work into a game and... made it into a game. Making work into a game is an idiotic idea. Make work into work. Pay people a fair salary that gets their minds off of their salary. Align the goals of the employee with the goals of the company, not their own selfish instincts to game whatever system you put in place to try to "reward" them. Make the success of the company be their reward, whether that be with equity or simple fair across-the-board raises. I worked for a company a few years ago that used to be full of politics and internal conflict. One year they did extremely well and decided to simplify and give everyone a straight $10,000 bonus, from the janitor to the CEO. There was no way to game this: everyone knew how much everyone got. Everyone was proud of the company and each other. Instead of secretly discussing how much bonus other people got behind their back, everyone was excited and happy and asking each other "so what are you going to do with your 10 G's?" It was the best day at that company. You can argue against this all you want, but I experienced a level of alignment there that was unparalleled. The people who get off on doing all they can to advance their own paycheck and get a bigger bonus only ended up hurting the company through their politics and game-playing. They were invariably working in a self-centered direction tangent to the company's goals. When that was removed, the dynamic changed completely and it was remarkable how much improvement the company saw not just in the workplace but across the board. New products were released that year that were better than the last, quality improved, efficiency improved. These fears that in order to achieve high performance, we must reward the high performers with carrots and hit the slackers with sticks are a bastardized religious fiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
- bloblaw 14y ago
  > One year they did extremely well and decided to simplify and give everyone a straight $10,000 bonus, from the janitor to the CEO So the guy that watches YouTube videos for 3 hours, and the guy that takes 2 hours worth of smoke breaks a day got the same as the gal that works 50 hours a week and fixes the majority of the product issues? Contributions are not equal so please don't treat them that way or you will only disenfranchise your BEST employees. And remember, your best employees are the ones that have the most options elsewhere....
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
gawker 14y ago
This sounds similar to what Rypple is doing: http://rypple.com/ http://rypple.com/ From the comments, it seems like no one has tried to game the system but I'm wondering if in a large corporation, anyone would try to game it?
eof 14y ago
I don't remember the exact details, but I have been a long time happy customer of hotdrupal.net The owner Steve made something like a request for bonuses for his employees and any extra money sent went straight to the employees. I thought it was a nice gesture. Not exactly what the article is talking about, but it does seem to literally be crowdsourcing bonuses.
systematical 14y ago
article snippet: "logs into unicorn" me: vomit and close browser
_pferreir_ 14y ago
I think a hybrid performance reviewing system would be the best: supervisors, supervised and peers. It is frustrating that managers do not get evaluated for their management capabilities - why not let those who they manage have a saying? They, better than anyone else, know how good of a leader this person is.
- edwardog 14y ago
  Shopify employee/original author of unicorn here. This bonus/props thing is really just for fun and recognition more than anything else. Performance reviews and salary adjustments have their own separate process.
ashliana 14y ago
Initial issue/concern I see is that it would seem people who have more internally-interactive/colleague-facing job roles would unfairly receive more unicorns/more $$. So workers who are pretty independent or mostly external-facing would be less likely to receive equitable bonus/appreciation for a job well done. Of course the client-facing positions can more easily have another metric for determining bonuses, though I think many times those metrics are pretty flawed. Anyway. I like the idea of crowdsourcing a bonus, but think it needs to have a lot more nuance in it than it appears exists in Shopify's approach in order to actually be a fair and robust tool for bonus determination. Love the unicorn touch, though!
zeroonetwothree 14y ago
There is also this older hacker news item that's relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620546
codeonfire 14y ago
My approach has been to just to ignore reviews, compensation, and bonuses altogether. People are simply not capable of getting this right. Everyone knows how dishonest people can be, especially in the workplace. To have any sort of review system requires and assumption of honest reviewers, which isn't even close to reality. The job market will sort things out in most cases over the long term.

72 points by rguzman 14y ago

I haven't met anyone with a nice word to say about performance reviews. If you are performing well and delivering results, to then have this annual review process which gives you a big list of all of the extraneous areas that you 'need to improve on' can be a complete sap on the old motivation. Especially if it's accompanied by the typical 1-2% pay increment. That can really be a drag.... I've quoted this article on the topic a number of times, but it's spot on IMO - http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/02/mediocrity_by_a.html http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/0... If you're going to do them, performance reviews should be about identifying the areas where people are great, and working out how to extract more of that....

crewtide 14y ago
Yeah, the biggest issue with management in general (and performance reviews in particular) is that it's focused on what people are doing poorly at/where they need improvement. Good managers find out what each employee is awesome at and get them doing it. If you hire someone and what they love to do and are great at isn't what you need at your company, then you've hired the wrong person. But I know lots of people who left a job because they kept asking to be moved to a different role, different team, etc, and nothing happened. Managers: focus on what each person is great at and loves to do.
- ironchef 14y ago
  It's a pendulum. If management blows smoke and kissy faces all day at me telling me my poo doesn't stink, that's not helpful. If they only point out what is being done incorrectly, that's not good. A blend between the two plus upward reviews (my opinion) have been best when i've seen them in use. Unfortunately, most companies and people don't design and execute performance reviews well.
ironchef 14y ago
"If you're going to do them, performance reviews should be about identifying the areas where people are great, and working out how to extract more of that..." I disagree. Performance reviews should be about performance. They should examine what one excels at and what one does poorly. They should then use those results to improve individuals, teams, and the company. Person alpha is great at TDD? Person bravo sucks at it? Pair 'em up. Similarly the results should influence compensation in a meaningful manner? You blew your results out of the water and only get a 1% raise? That's crap. Management's performance sucks in this case (that's why upward reviews are also key).
- nowarninglabel 14y ago
  Why do you think pairing person alpha and person bravo will magically result in person bravo acquiring the skills of person alpha? Among all the possibilites, you might just bring person alpha down without improving person bravo at all. Then, you've made everyone more inefficient.
  - ironchef 14y ago
    I didn't state it would magically result in that...i'm sorry if that's what you inferred; however, i've found in the past that good people teaching about some subject tend to learn more about the subject in the teaching of said subject. Like anything else, teaching / mentoring / pairing are skills...those could be horrible as well.

bloblaw 14y ago

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

z2600 14y ago
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.
- bloblaw 14y ago
  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.
  - dstorrs 14y ago
    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.

zavulon 14y ago

There's also DueProps, who turn this into a game: https://dueprops.com/ https://dueprops.com/

jturn 14y ago
http://angel.co/dueprops http://angel.co/dueprops Looks like this is the tool that shopify uses. See the comment from the CEO.
- xal 14y ago
  DueProps is loosely modelled on Unicorn

tomjen3 14y ago

That is going to work well when the employees starts to gang up together and give each other unicorns in return for their unicorns.

smackfu 14y ago
Yeah, we had a little "thanks" program at work that had similar issues. People tended to just reciprocate praise, because it didn't cause any drama, and both people made out.
therandomguy 14y ago
I have seen this happen on Yammer. Now tie bonus to that and you have got a worse system than traditional performance reviews.
hmahncke 14y ago
Yup - this system gamifies reciprocal altruism, creates cliques and circular thank-you unicorns, and generally sounds de-motivating by quantifying the exact dollar value of a thank you.
edwardog 14y ago
I wrote the first version of this at Shopify. We anticipated the need to see this kind of behaviour, so there's clear auditing trails for everything that HR and Accounting can see where the bonus money's going. Having said that, we haven't seen this problem appear yet.
xal 14y ago
simple - fireable offence

agentultra 14y ago

I hate bonuses. I'd rather get equity or a bigger salary. I'm shy and I don't like pandering for attention. I just like getting things done, finding ways to make it easier to get things done, and shipping code so I can go enjoy a beer. I could really care less for bureaucracy and competition. It's inefficient.

calinet6 14y ago

Here's an idea: remove all politics from the process completely and do away with performance-oriented bonus systems. They've taken what was essentially a way to make their work into a game and... made it into a game. Making work into a game is an idiotic idea. Make work into work. Pay people a fair salary that gets their minds off of their salary. Align the goals of the employee with the goals of the company, not their own selfish instincts to game whatever system you put in place to try to "reward" them. Make the success of the company be their reward, whether that be with equity or simple fair across-the-board raises. I worked for a company a few years ago that used to be full of politics and internal conflict. One year they did extremely well and decided to simplify and give everyone a straight $10,000 bonus, from the janitor to the CEO. There was no way to game this: everyone knew how much everyone got. Everyone was proud of the company and each other. Instead of secretly discussing how much bonus other people got behind their back, everyone was excited and happy and asking each other "so what are you going to do with your 10 G's?" It was the best day at that company. You can argue against this all you want, but I experienced a level of alignment there that was unparalleled. The people who get off on doing all they can to advance their own paycheck and get a bigger bonus only ended up hurting the company through their politics and game-playing. They were invariably working in a self-centered direction tangent to the company's goals. When that was removed, the dynamic changed completely and it was remarkable how much improvement the company saw not just in the workplace but across the board. New products were released that year that were better than the last, quality improved, efficiency improved. These fears that in order to achieve high performance, we must reward the high performers with carrots and hit the slackers with sticks are a bastardized religious fiction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

bloblaw 14y ago
> One year they did extremely well and decided to simplify and give everyone a straight $10,000 bonus, from the janitor to the CEO So the guy that watches YouTube videos for 3 hours, and the guy that takes 2 hours worth of smoke breaks a day got the same as the gal that works 50 hours a week and fixes the majority of the product issues? Contributions are not equal so please don't treat them that way or you will only disenfranchise your BEST employees. And remember, your best employees are the ones that have the most options elsewhere....

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

gawker 14y ago

This sounds similar to what Rypple is doing: http://rypple.com/ http://rypple.com/ From the comments, it seems like no one has tried to game the system but I'm wondering if in a large corporation, anyone would try to game it?

eof 14y ago

I don't remember the exact details, but I have been a long time happy customer of hotdrupal.net The owner Steve made something like a request for bonuses for his employees and any extra money sent went straight to the employees. I thought it was a nice gesture. Not exactly what the article is talking about, but it does seem to literally be crowdsourcing bonuses.

systematical 14y ago

article snippet: "logs into unicorn" me: vomit and close browser

_pferreir_ 14y ago

I think a hybrid performance reviewing system would be the best: supervisors, supervised and peers. It is frustrating that managers do not get evaluated for their management capabilities - why not let those who they manage have a saying? They, better than anyone else, know how good of a leader this person is.

edwardog 14y ago
Shopify employee/original author of unicorn here. This bonus/props thing is really just for fun and recognition more than anything else. Performance reviews and salary adjustments have their own separate process.

ashliana 14y ago

Initial issue/concern I see is that it would seem people who have more internally-interactive/colleague-facing job roles would unfairly receive more unicorns/more $$. So workers who are pretty independent or mostly external-facing would be less likely to receive equitable bonus/appreciation for a job well done. Of course the client-facing positions can more easily have another metric for determining bonuses, though I think many times those metrics are pretty flawed. Anyway. I like the idea of crowdsourcing a bonus, but think it needs to have a lot more nuance in it than it appears exists in Shopify's approach in order to actually be a fair and robust tool for bonus determination. Love the unicorn touch, though!

zeroonetwothree 14y ago

There is also this older hacker news item that's relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620546 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=620546

codeonfire 14y ago

My approach has been to just to ignore reviews, compensation, and bonuses altogether. People are simply not capable of getting this right. Everyone knows how dishonest people can be, especially in the workplace. To have any sort of review system requires and assumption of honest reviewers, which isn't even close to reality. The job market will sort things out in most cases over the long term.