What are peer-bonuses?

The idea is if someone helps you in a really big way that you’re able to reward that. So you can ask the company to give the person either credits for an internal store, or a direct addition to their salary for one month.

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 wasn't aware of bonuses-as-a-service. Thanks for sharing.

My last workplace had a similar institution, only the reward was candy bar or similar that you could go grab from a bowl in the kitchen (working on an honor code basis), in addition to getting some praise on Slack for general warm fuzzies. It was more of a symbolic gesture for recognizing small everyday things, of course, but it was nice IMO.

Capitalism in action!

I don’t get the connection to capitalism here. Care to elaborate?

Probably referring to the fact that they only rewarded them with a candy bar for being a good employee. Which ignores the fact that they're already probably getting paid a decent salary to do their job, and being a good employee is already part of the job description to receive said salary. Anything extra is nice.

Yeah. The chocolate was of course a triviality, more important was the idea of encouraging people to give public thanks and the associated (extremely immaterial) karma points when thanks are due. In this culture (Finnish) we're perhaps not very good at giving praise, and even worse at receiving it, so it helps to have an established ritual for doing so. Also, I think at least one of the original goals was to mitigate the silo effect and encourage people to help their coworkers in other projects and such.

Really, it just references the ridiculous lengths companies do to not actually pay employees to do good work. Utterly broken reward systems, foosball tables, etc.

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.

And yes, anyone could also propose that anyone be given an actual monetary raise, and as far as I know, typically those also happened.

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.)

Look, I’m just as cynical about capitalism and perverse reward systems and all that as anyone, but nobody was talking about “saving the company blah blah zillion million dollars”, more like simply offering a helping hand to someone who feels gratitude about it. It worked 100% on an employee-to-employee basis, there was zero management structure or process involved. And it was something that anyone in the company could’ve established, just by ordering a fifty eurobuck’s worth of candy on the company credit and proposing the idea to the rest of the company which was 1) small back then 2) incredibly committed to employee wellbeing in all the right ways.

This video should help: https://youtu.be/QIrM9vKKxTs

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.

> The idea is if someone helps you in a really big way that you’re able to reward that

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.

By systematising/gamifying this stuff you actually help distract people from participating in the realpolitik going on within the executive team. If you stop other non-exec level realising the real way power is exercised within the company with these distractions it removes a potentially very large pool of competitors for power within the org.

> would have been considered "career limiting" in traditional big corporations.

How so?

Don't know about your flavor of 'traditional big corporations' but my banking megacorp has internal reward system across various 'virtues' for a decade+ at least. Its not direct reward -> money link (thats rather for hiring success), it just helps you create sort of karma, and when bonuses, raises and promotions are considered then this is taken into account.

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.

Big bank. Management theory at the time was to create competition between the silos for resources, time, budget, headcount, good desk locations in the bi-annual room desk shuffle, bonuses and even time of day from management. Even sales and trading - the most symbiotic of functions competed.

Credits to the store? I have never heard of this or seen that.

Something designed to remove all intrinsic motivation from employees

Bonuses make a lot of sense in the financial sector, because the whole endeavor is about making money. Intrinsic motivation and making more money align. Historically it got introduced in order to mitigate cheating customers for personal gain. Also it helps that individual contributions are trivially quantifiable to a very large degree.

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".

> intrinsic motivation

Funny way to spell "unpaid extra work".

Basically a way to "tip" people for going out of their way to help you, except that the "tip" comes out of the company's pocket, not yours.

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.

I was in Kindergarten and watching my fellow classmates get gold star stickers on their work. They were excited when it happened to them. I saw it as being given nothing of real value and person could just go to the store and buy them for $1 or $2.

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.

At a previous company I worked at, peer bonuses literally resulted in a small bonus at the end of the pay period. No gift card, just an email notification and money credited to your account. Most motivating form of peer appreciation I've seen.

They weren't getting a sticker. They were getting a dopamine hit.

You can give someone a $175 bonus for being particularly helpful or going above and beyond. Everyone can give 20/year so it doesn't have to be that crazy of an effort to get one (although most people don't give out all 20 and the limit wasn't even enforced for a while).

It technically requires manager approval but it's kind of a faux pas for a manager to deny one unless it's a duplicate.