meh, bonuses are hard. Once you start giving them, people like this start saying that you are 'punishing' your people if you don't give them a bonus that is quite as large next year.
I mean, obviously, the idea behind a bonus is that it's something you don't always get; something extra, so that employees can share when the company is doing well, or a extra thank you to employees who worked extra hard or who were especially effective at helping the company.
Of course, trying to get employees who have the same attitude as the author to have the right attitude about bonuses is hard, and I don't really have any good ideas how, other than making bonuses rare, which has it's own problems. Maybe having bonuses not on a set schedule? (e.g. tie the bonuses to, say, breaking a quarterly revenue record, and only give bonuses when that event occurs, rather than every year, once a year?)
This reminds me of a guy at the last place I worked. It wasn't bonuses he was on about (though we had that issue come up, too), but performance appraisal. He was always trying to figure out just how much he needed to do to "far exceed expectations", as though by accomplishing just that much (and no more?) each year, he could "far exceed" consistently.
I think he might have been a little unclear on the concept.
I think the problem with this program is that it's tied not to the success of the company itself -- which everyone has a stake in -- but the success of social features with which many people at Google probably aren't even involved, and over which they have no control.
Perhaps the idea is that the Google employees will suddenly feel compelled to get all their family and friends to use the social stuff, and they'll in turn bring in their friends, and that will be enough to tip it into mainstream usage
I've worked at two companies where the bonuses worked well, and both of them tied their bonuses to events: either getting code past a milestone, or sales of a product reachign a certain level (though this one was a little too delayed from the actual work)
I mean, obviously, the idea behind a bonus is that it's something you don't always get; something extra, so that employees can share when the company is doing well, or a extra thank you to employees who worked extra hard or who were especially effective at helping the company.
Of course, trying to get employees who have the same attitude as the author to have the right attitude about bonuses is hard, and I don't really have any good ideas how, other than making bonuses rare, which has it's own problems. Maybe having bonuses not on a set schedule? (e.g. tie the bonuses to, say, breaking a quarterly revenue record, and only give bonuses when that event occurs, rather than every year, once a year?)