Yes you do. This should be recognized via bonuses, raises, and/or promotions as appropriate. It's not immediate, but it does manifest over time. If it doesn't, use the experience gained to move to a company that appreciates such work and rewards it appropriately.
Which takes 1-2 years of very hard work to discover, by which time the employee has invested a huge amount of effort for 10-30% more salary and 1-20% more equity than a new hire who has contributed nothing.
And this employee has to wonder why they're contributing so much more when other people are doing almost nothing and getting nearly the same reward. Which leads to the best people quitting and the worst people staying.
Most startups treat "The Senior Leadership Team" like unique people who matter and have to be compensated like they're hard to replace. They get employment contracts, large bonuses of equity/cash, and special treatment. Everyone else gets lip service and the treatment of replaceable cogs in the chain.
For example, the 10x programmer typically gets 10-20% of what an incompetent VP will earn in total comp. Because they're treated like two different classes of employee.
And this fact hurts most companies deeply in ways they'll never understand. It shows up in project delays and huge problems, which ultimately cost far, far more than it would've cost to keep the best contributors.
At nearly every job, I've gotten a raise nearly every year. But the raises generally are very small, 5-10k a year. I'm not going to work nights and weekends for another taxed 5k.
No company I've ever worked at has a bonus system. I would gladly get a feature out in 2 weeks, instead of 4, if it meant a extra $5k check in my bank. Instead, repeatedly doing that for a whole year means a taxed $5k raise at the end.
Not. Worth. It.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean working longer hours! Out of the people I've worked with, the overlap between working extra hours and having outsize positive impact is smaller than you might expect. Incentivizing extra hours for their own sake would be actively counterproductive.
I'd also say that people generally overestimate the effect of formal financial incentives and underestimate informal social incentives. Company and team culture can have a much larger effect than compensation, especially when everyone is being paid a lot in absolute terms.
No, no we don’t. I like working just as much as the next person, but I prefer my evaluation to be based on me and my peers working 40 hours, as opposed to me working 40 and them working 60.
Employees, at least a lot of them, ask for bonus systems. They seem to love bonus systems and shun/dislike companies that have a proper bonus system: none.
Bonuses (and other shenanigans) only kills team work and team spirit and make it an everyone against everyone game. And don't tell me that you get too many slackers without a bonus system. Slackers are actually usually pretty good at playing the bonus game, i.e. doing exactly what is required to get the right numbers to get a bonus. Whether that's helping the company or the team in the long run is none of their concern.
This is essentially how the bonus system works at the big software companies. People with the same title might make roughly the same salary, but have very different stock compensation, which gets updated every year based on performance and can be much larger than the base salary. It's why you see such a wide range of numbers on sites like levels.fyi (for example $300K to $900K for a staff engineer at Google).
https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...
The issue I have with salary structure is that you have no opportunity for going above and beyond. If I work a minimum hours to get my job done, I get payed the same amount than if I went overtime and finished my tasks sooner.
It seems like software industry needs a bonus system for people who are eager to lean into their work, but struggle to see the reason to when it’s just another company that will do nothing about it.
To be clear - salary is much better than an hourly + overtime system. The former provides a ton of flexibility. It’s just that it provides little to no incentive for going above and beyond.