I got my year-end bonus today. I really hadn’t given it any thought, how it was calculated, where it maxed out, because any company I’ve ever worked with where I was eligible for a bonus, I never got it.
And my experience has been that nobody else ever gets the bonus either, with the exception of people in sales and people in the highest echelons of the company.
Rank-and-file people don’t get bonuses. If the company wanted to pay you the bonus, they’d make it part of your salary.
Anyway . . . I do training classes for software engineers, and it turns out my bonus is calculated based on graduation rate and student surveys, where students respond to statements like “I receive actionable feedback on my performance” on a 5-point scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.
I had no idea. As it turns out, I did get the full bonus, but if I’d known it was based in part on student feedback, I might have been a little nicer to people.
Thus spoke The Programmer.