“I just want to store 5TiB somewhere”
“Ha! Did you book multiple bigtable cells”
Obviously, there are limits to how many pay bonuses you can give out and if it’s direct money or store credits.
Directly asking for a peer bonus’ is not very “googly” (and yes, this is a term they use- in case you needed evidence of Google being a bit cultish).
There are companies who help do this “as a service”; https://bonusly.com/
I have several times saved my companies multiples of my salary in saved cloud costs or other instances, and always of my own initiative out of "professionalism". There are lots of stories I recall on HN comments of similar things, and sure maybe they got a promotion or a title... I have heard of AWS tech people getting pretty big bonuses for big service wins. But that was a huge anomaly.
Capitalism is supposed to (in theory) reward efficiency and productivity. The CEOs certainly know how to advocate for financial performance rewards, as do many other managerial tiers.
Candy bars? Christ, it's kindergarten. I just never fail to be amazed that "capitalism" is a bunch of rigid hierarchical despotic firms fighting in a "free market"... well back when there were approximation of free markets. When you're in these tightly structured orgs, it's like authoritarian planned economies (that is communism in the totalitarian soviet sense, not any putative ideal of communism).
I'll spare you all the further rants about Middle Manaagement Machiavellianism.
Congrats on your candy bar and employee of the week picture.
Also, there was no middle management.
(And yes, I know, there are real problems with that sort of popularity-based thing that can absolutely cause bias against the quiet, well-performing type too modest to ask for a raise either.)
People don't show up to work for a gold star, they want money. Any consolation you offer employees in the form of a candy bar or massage credits can be better expressed as a fiscal bonus that isn't half as patronizing.
If you see this as a "why can't we have nice things" situation, then you must not grasp how these incentives replace actual motivation. It's the equivalent of tipping culture transposed to overpaid SWE seats. It should not exist. Fair compensation should be demanded as a baseline.
It never ceases to amaze me how (early) big tech embraced and even promoted things that would have been considered "career limiting" in traditional big corporations.
How so?
Since that process is invisible to those being measured you never know details (and shouldn't as long as management is sane, and if isn't this the least of your concerns), but its not ignored and in this way it helps keeping people motivated to generally do good work.
Obviously there are other professions that share some of these characteristics, like sales. Or if you narrow down a goal or task to "save us money".
Funny way to spell "unpaid extra work".
To prevent obvious abuse, you need to provide a rationale, the receiver's manager must approve and there's a limit to how many you can dish out per quarter.
It is a social engineering technique to exploit more work without increasing wages. Just like "Employee of the Month" or a "Pizza Party."
Company I work for does this with gift cards as rewards. I was reprimanded because I sent an email to HR that this " gift" is as useful as a wet rage in the rain. I don't eat at restaurants that are franchises or have a ticker on Wall Street. Prefer local brick and mortar over Walmart and will never financial support Amazon.
If you want to truly honor my accomplishments, give me a raise or more PTO. Anything else is futile. That gift card to Walmart has 0 value towards a quality purchase like a RADAR or LiDAR development kit to learn more or such.
It technically requires manager approval but it's kind of a faux pas for a manager to deny one unless it's a duplicate.
Do not miss
This was posted in my front office when I started my company over 30 years ago.
It was a no-brainer, same thing I was doing for my employer beforehand. Experimentation.
By the author's distinction in the terminology, if you consider the complexity relative to the complications in something like Google technology, it is on a different scale compared to the absolute chaos relative to the mere remaining complexity when you apply it to natural science.
I learned how to do what I do directly from people who did it in World War II.
And that was when I was over 40 years younger, plus I'm not done yet. Still carrying the baton in the industrial environment where the institutions have a pseudo-military style hierarchy and bureaucracy. Which I'm very comfortable working around ;)
Well, the army is a massive mainstream corp.
There are always some things that corps don't handle very well, but generals don't always care, if they have overwhelming force to apply, lots of different kinds of objectives can be overcome.
Teamwork, planning, military-style discipline & chain-of-command/org-chart, strength in numbers, all elements which are hallmarks of effective armies over the centuries.
The engineers are an elite team among them. Traditionally like the technology arm, engaged to leverage the massive resources even more effectively.
The bigger the objective, the stronger these elements will be brought to bear.
Even in an unopposed maneuver, steam-rolling all easily recognized obstacles more and more effectively as they up the ante, at the same time bigger and bigger unscoped problems accumulate which are exactly the kind that can not be solved with teamwork and planning (since these are often completely forbidden). When there must be extreme individual ability far beyond that, and it must emanate from the top decision-maker or have "equivalent" access to the top individual decision-maker. IOW might as well not even be "in" the org chart since it's just a few individuals directly attached to the top square, nobody's working for further promotions or recognition beyond that point.
When military discipline in practice is simply not enough discipline, and not exactly the kind that's needed by a long shot.
That's why even in the military there are a few Navy Seals here and there, because sometimes there are serious problems that are the kind of impossible that a whole army cannot solve ;)
Google, where the impossible stuff is reduced to merely hard, and the easy stuff is raised to hard.