how would you even allocate the money fairly besides rolling it into the company to keep it alive and successful (and maybe the added profit increases the bonus pool if that exists)?

The engineers didn't do it in isolation - how much of a share goes to the office receptionist that answered the phones and kept visitors out of the way of the engineers? How much goes to the Finance department that kept the engineering paychecks coming while they did they work? How much goes to the salespeople who kept the deals flowing and money coming in that filled the disks in the first place... and so on and so on.

Once a company exits the "a few devs in a garage" stage, many people contribute to the company's success.

Let's face it, increasing your employer's profit margin will only benefit the employees if the company is struggling and they were about to be laid off because costs were starting to eat into the margins. The only case where it does is with a bonus or with workers owning shares with dividends. "keeping it alive and successful" only matters if that wouldn't have happened otherwise and even then not much if you have good job mobility.

No need to allocate. Something like "our clever engineers managed to save us $2M per year, so we're giving everyone a $500 bonus this month" seams entirely reasonable.

I don't know about this company or if it's profitable, but in many small startups, saving money decreases the burn rate, which extends the time before the company runs out of money, can become profitable, or needs to close another round of funding.

I have worked in high tech since 1983. Over my career, I have received unsolicited bonuses, stock grants, and other perks, from time to time.

At the same time, when I thought I had made a material contribution to the company's success that was above and beyond my normal role, I would ask for compensation of one kind or another. At times, I was told no, and at other times, my request was granted. I believe Wayne Gretzky said something like "You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take."

My lived experience is that life is not fair. In the organizations where I was an employee, owner or executive, it has never been the case that everyone, in their "heart of hearts," really believed everything was entirely fair.

I think it's right and proper to recognize and work to correct injustices, to the extent possible, yet I think it's also true that people vary all over the map and on a perhaps uncountable number of dimensions, and trying to achieve complete fairness is simply not possible.

I will also say that my belief that life is not fair does not require us to go through life constantly angry and frustrated.

I could be wrong, and I don't wish to put words in your mouth. Interested in your thoughts, if you want to say more.

I'm not sure how appropriate it is to take a serious comment where the author has a genuinely unpopular opinion and say you laughed really hard at it.

It's clearly not a serious comment, and I say this as someone who thinks there should be more workers' cooperatives in the tech industry.

I was and still am entirely serious. I don’t know you and doubt that you and I have ever said three words to each other. What’s your basis for your claim to clearly know my intent?

The article author works for a company that has 54 open positions. Thousands of capable developers will or have already read his article. Why can he not talk about how great it is to be a developer at his company? Seems like a missed opportunity to me.

Also, if you are an engineer that can save your company millions of dollars in real life, that’s worth something, isn’t it? You won’t get paid for it unless you have the courage to ask hard questions.

Your experience will obviously be different than mine. But please don’t pretend that you know me, or what I’m thinking when I offer a comment. It would be much better to show up with curiosity rather than condescension.

I wish you well.

Condescension is bad, but disingenuously affected curiosity is worse. I put it to you that your tone here makes it very clear that your original comment was not actually sincere and you were far from "curious". You're not doing your cause any favours.

Thanks for this comment, the reply from lmm made me doubt if I was misreading the situation. Now I'm glad I wrote what I did.

I interpreted that as Imm correctly identifying my comment as a joke.

Regardless of how sincere the original post was, my comment was very obviously (to me, at least) a swipe at the morally bankrupt world we inhabit and the fact that a company doing this of their own volition right now feels absurd - not a dig at the idea itself.

To the original point - I tend to agree with people elsewhere in the thread saying this particular idea is infeasible and ignores the behind-the-scenes contributions of other staff. I am however very much in favour of the related concept of making employee ownership mandatory in certain situations (think anything on a major stock exchange). In that scenario, the cost savings would "trickle down" to all employees.